Coresender Quick Start Guide

Sławomir Pucia

August 28, 2020

So you have signed up for a Coresender account and most probably already confirmed your email address. This guide will take you through the next steps of configuring your account to the point of sending your first email:

Step 1 – Add a sending account
Step 2 – Add your sending domain
Step 3 – Configure your sending domain
Step 4 – Send your first email

Step 1 – Add a sending account

Sending accounts are a way to separate your emailing activities. For example, suppose you're going to send emails from a few separate systems (e.g., issue tracking software, CRM, your main app). In that case, you can use different sending accounts for better accounting. Anyway, the first sending account is mandatory.

You also have to decide what types of emails you plan on sending through the sending account: transactional or marketing. It is a crucial step, as we have a policy against using our transactional sending accounts for marketing emails. Please refer to our article on Transactional vs. Marketing emails.

Step 2 – Add your sending domain

All your outgoing emails have to contain a sender's email address. We have to make sure that this address is within the domain you control and that this domain authorized Coresender to email on its behalf.

First, add your sending domain. On the "Add domain" screen, provide its name and select a sending account to which you want to assign the domain. You can freely reassign it later.

When you're ready, click the "Add domain" button below the form, and your domain will appear on the list. Click its name to enter the details screen.

Step 3 – Configure your sending domain

One of the main aspects that affect deliverability is the sender domain authorization. The receiving party uses authorization methods such as SPF and DKIM to verify whether the From address is legitimate. That's why the correct domain configuration is essential. And it easy, too. You only have to add a few records to your DNS.

Once you're ready with adding those records, press the "Verify domain" button, and our system will check the DNS to verify the configuration.

Your typical disclaimer. Some DNS services (like Cloudflare) will propagate your changes within seconds. But some will require several hours. If this is a case, you'll have to give it some time before verifying the domain again.

After the successful verification, your domain will turn "all green". You're ready for the next step.

Step 4 – Send your first email

Now that you have your sending account and domain ready, you can send your first email. You will use Coresender API to do this, and you will use your Account ID and API Key for authentication. You will find them on your sending account details screen.

Let's use curl to send the first email. Head out to our API documentation and take a look at the Send email API. You'll find a sample code that showcases all features of this API. For this example, let's use a minimalistic version, though:

POST/v1/send_email

Click to copy

curl -X POST https://api.coresender.com/v1/send_email \
  -u 'account_id:api_key' \
  -d $'[
    {
      "from": {
        "email": "jean.luc@app.pucia.com",
        "name": "Jean-Luc Picard"
      },
      "to": [
        { 
          "email": "geordi@app.pucia.com",
          "name": "Geordi La Forge"
        }
      ],
      "subject": "I need engines",
      "body": {
        "text": "Geordi, I need engines, now!"
      }
    }
  ]'

Before running the code, replace account_id and api_key with the values you have obtained from the control panel. You also have to replace from.email with an email address within your verified sending domain. The to.email address can be any valid email address.

Let's run the code now and check the result:

API response

{
  "data": [{
    "message_id": "7dd8eab0-ceca-4335-8291-5caffe329ef6",
    "custom_id": "",
    "status": "accepted",
    "errors": []
  }],
  "meta": {
    "rq_time": "0.0243s"
  }
}

You can read a few things from the response:

The message got accepted without any errors
The message got its unique ID which you can use to search for it in the activity screen of our control panel
API request took 24ms to complete

Here's our email arriving at the recipient's inbox:

And here's the message timeline that you can find in Coresender's control panel:

Congratulations!

You have just sent your first email with Coresender. What you can do next:

Explore our open source SDKs and start working on your integration. Remember that any standard HTTP library will allow you to integrate Coresender in any language, even if we don't provide an SDK.
Request your organization to be approved by Coresender so you can upgrade from the free developer plan and start using our service in your production environment.

Sławomir Pucia

Hi, I'm Sławek, Head of Product at Coresender. I work with all our teams to ensure we deliver a product that our customers love and value.

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