Introduction

To enhance email delivery and notification services, VIDIZMO integrates with SendGrid. This integration allows VIDIZMO to deliver emails and notifications at scale without any performance issues.


SendGrid provides an SMTP service that allows VIDIZMO to deliver emails or notifications via SendGrid servers. This ensures reliable and scalable email delivery for your SMTP needs. 

To learn more about SendGrid, click here.


Concept

SendGrid functions primarily as a third-party SMTP service, enabling it to send emails on behalf of VIDIZMO and its clients to enhance delivery rates. VIDIZMO's integration with SendGrid allows portal users to use SendGrid as a notification and email service in addition to the standard SMTP service. 



In VIDIZMO, when an event occurs, it is sent to the broker service. The broker service then passes the message to the notification service, which acts as a messenger for sending emails. The notification service identifies the portal and checks its configured notifier, whether it is SendGrid or SMTP, and then sends the notification or email through the appropriate notifier.


If the notifier is configured as SendGrid in the portal, SendGrid's SMTP mail servers will send emails and notifications through SendGrid instead of using a webmail client or any other server. The account holder must have a verified SendGrid account to use SendGrid as a notifier in the VIDIZMO portal. The API key is configured in the VIDIZMO portal to leverage SendGrid's services.


Key Benefits of Using SendGrid as an SMTP Service in VIDIZMO

  1. One of the major benefits of using SendGrid as an SMTP service is its ability to handle a high volume of notifications, whether sending a few emails or millions of emails per month, without performance concerns.
  2. SendGrid provides robust and comprehensive metrics and analytics reporting functionality, allowing you to track emails. It provides advanced data collection, including opens, clicks, and subscription tracking based on user engagement. 
  3. The significant advantage of using SendGrid is email deliverability, which ensures that emails reach the recipient's folder.SendGrid offers customers the option to use dedicated IP addresses. 
  4. SendGrid maintains relationships with ISPs, sets up available feedback loops, and monitors deny lists and spam reports. 


Who Should Use SendGrid as an SMTP Service

SendGrid is optimal for High-Volume senders who prioritize inbox delivery and manage large quantities of email daily. Organizations and businesses aiming to scale alongside their SMTP solution find SendGrid advantageous due to its scalability, offering multiple packages tailored to user requirements. It's a powerful tool for people in email marketing who are seeking comprehensive analytics and tracking for email performance, empowering them to make data-driven decisions. For those without their servers, it provides a solution to offload the complexities associated with managing email servers.


Advance Functionality

In the VIDIZMO portal, when using SendGrid as an SMTP service, you can access advanced functionality options that can be enabled based on your specific requirements. The configuration options allow you to manage different aspects of SendGrid.  


Categories

Streamline your email management by assigning category labels such as "Primary" or "Social" to organize messages by subject matter and monitor them through analytics. The categories you set up in the email settings apply to your VIDIZMO account.  

 

By utilizing categories, you can effectively structure your email analytics, allowing you to label outgoing emails according to your specified topics. This facilitates tracking based on your personalized categorization framework. 


You can refer to the SendGrid activity feed using the advanced search to view your email activity analytics. Search by the category names you created in the VIDIZMO portal.  


Importance

This functionality empowers users to designate the priority level for message delivery, enabling them to convey the urgency of their communication. Users can choose the delivery importance, determining if emails should go to the inbox promptly or in a less time-sensitive manner.


IP Pool

SendGrid offers dedicated IP addresses, and IP pools enable users to group these dedicated SendGrid IP addresses. Using IP pools helps manage the sending reputation of different email types, ensuring higher deliverability and protecting crucial emails from being marked as spam.  


When using IP pools, you can specify a name for each pool (e.g., "Marketing Emails"), but only one name at a time. It's important to note that IP pools can only be used with IP addresses that have a configured reverse DNS record.


If you don't specify an IP pool, it will use any available IP, including those within IP pools. Users can create up to 100 distinct IP pools for managing email delivery reputations. Learn more.


SandBox Mode

You can use sandbox mode to test email formatting without sending the email to recipients. While in sandbox mode, test emails are not sent, and actions do not generate events. This feature helps test and refine emails before sending them out.


Tracking

  • Click Tracking

Click tracking monitors recipient engagement with your emails. This feature modifies all links and URLs within your emails to route them through SendGrid's servers. It allows SendGrid to track clicks whenever recipients interact with these links.


Each email can track up to 1000 links. With click tracking enabled, you can monitor recipient interactions such as opening emails, clicking links, and subscribing or unsubscribing. 

  • Text Tracking

You can enable text tracking to track interactions with text-format links. It tracks even if the user copies and pastes the link into their browser. 

  • Open Tracking

Utilize open tracking to gain visibility into the number of recipients who open your emails. By enabling open tracking, an invisible image is appended to the end of each email, facilitating the tracking of email opens.


 When a recipient with images enabled in their email client opens the email, SendGrid's server receives a request for the invisible image. Upon receipt of this request, an open event is logged, allowing you to monitor and analyze email engagement metrics.


Limitations

  • The number of emails you can send depends on the type of SendGrid package you subscribe to.
  • A user can assign up to 10 categories per email message.  
  • The total size of your email, including attachments, must be less than 30MB.
  • The total number of recipients per email is limited to 1,000, including all recipients in the cc, to, and bcc fields.

Troubleshooting 

In scenarios where recipients are not receiving emails and email delivery is unsuccessful, you can diagnose and resolve the issue by following these steps:

  • Verify that your SendGrid account is verified and that you are configuring the correct SendGrid API key in the VIDIZMO portal.
  • Check your network latency. Network problems may be due to your configuration or your ISP's configuration.
  • To troubleshoot an IP pool error, ensure the IP pool name is a valid string and matches a pool name in your account.


To implement SendGrid as a notifier in the VIDIZMO portal, refer to our documentation titled "How to Configure SendGrid as an SMTP Service in VIDIZMO."