Email Service Providers (ESP) improve email deliverability and give you great diagnostic logs when problems arise. ESPs virtually eliminate your mail ending up in spam folders or being blocked by webmail providers.
Some ESPs offer a free tier that allows you to send 1000s or more emails per month, adequate for many sites’ transactional emails like registration confirmations and receipts. Some of the more popular ones include smtp2go, Postmark, SendGrid, Mailgun, Mailjet and Amazon SES.
You need the following information from your ESP to configure MODX to send emails via their service:
- SMTP Server Address
- Username (sometimes the API key)
- Password (often a unique API key)
- Port Number (usually 587 … any other but 25)
- Connection or protocol prefix (usually tls)
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Login into the MODX Manager where you wish to add an ESP to for email delivery.
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At the top right of the MODX Manager, click/hover on the cog icon to reveal the menu.
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From the cog menu, click on System Settings and you'll be taken to a page with a grid of various settings and their values.
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In the field at the top right of the grid that has the placeholder text of Search by key… enter "SMTP" (without the quotation marks) as this will filter all the settings you need.
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Complete the setup of your SMTP settings for your ESP as follows:
- Use SMTP: Yes
- SMTP Port should usually be 587, or an alternate port your ESP provided
- SMTP Connection Prefix should usually be set to
tls, but may vary depending on your ESP - SMTP Authentication: Yes
- SMTP Password should be the password your ESP provided
- SMTP User should be the username your ESP provided
Here's a screenshot example using Postmark:
See the screenshots below for some of the more popular ESPs’ settings.
Mandrill (requires paid MailChimp account)
https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/200775287-SMTP-Basics
SendGrid
https://sendgrid.com/docs/Integrate/index.html
Postmark
https://postmarkapp.com/developer/user-guide/sending-email/sending-with-smtp
Mailgun
Amazon SES
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-email-smtp-software-package.html
Mailjet
The first example is the settings is SMTP when you first set up your account. The second is the view from the normal configuration. https://www.mailjet.com/support/how-can-i-configure-my-smtp-parameters,2.htm
Pepipost
https://pepipost.com/integrations/modx-integration/
Troubleshooting
If you think you've got everything set up properly, but emails are not sending, see our guide to Troubleshooting Email Delivery for details steps and tests to help resolve any issues.