Sending a Legacy Transactional Template Email over SMTP

Before you create and send a legacy transactional template email over SMTP you need to do the following:

• Integrate with the SendGrid SMTP API
• Send a test email over SMTP
• Build an SMTP Email
• Create a Legacy Transactional Template

To send a legacy transactional template email over SMTP, test your connection, choose a code example for your language, enable the template, and set the body and subject tags.

Sending a test SMTP email with Telnet is one of the most basic tests you can do. This test checks the connection and helps you determine the most basic problems:

• Is the server up?
• Is there a firewall blocking communication?
• Does the mail server allow for relaying of a particular domain/email address?
• What SMTP commands does the mail server support?
• Does the server respond with the correct hostname?
• Does the connection work outside any third party software or APIs?

• SMTP Go Code Example
• SMTP Node.js Code Example
• SMTP PHP Code Example
• SMTP Perl Code Example
• SMTP Python Code Example
• SMTP Ruby Code Example

• Go Code Example
• Node.js Code Example
• PHP Code Example
• Perl Code Example
• Python Code Example
• Ruby Code Example
• C# Code Example
• Java Code Example

To use a legacy template when you send, configure the X-SMTPAPI header of an SMTP message:

• Enable the templates filter
• Set the template_id to one of your legacy transactional templates

The <%subject%> property is used for both Text and HTML templates.

The text property is substituted into the <%body%> of the text template and html is substituted into the <%body%> of the HTML template.

Text or HTML Templates?

Enabling a legacy template means that the subject and body content of your message will behave differently.

• If you want only the message's content to be displayed, populate only the token in the template's field.
• If you want only the template's content to be displayed, leave the message field (subject or body) empty, and the template will populate.

You can use X-SMTPAPI substitution and section tags in your template's subject and body content, and they will be replaced with the values specified when you send the message.

Substitution tags allow you to generate dynamic content for each recipient on your list. When you send to a list of recipients over SMTP API, you can specify substitution tags specific to each recipient.

Section tags allow you to substitute in content in an SMTP message. Section tags are similar to substitution tags but are specific to the message, and not the recipient. Section tags have to be contained within a Substitution tag since SendGrid needs to know which data to populate for the recipient.