SendGrid

Three strengths

• Emails that reach inboxes. It claims a 99% deliverability rate, and one service handles both the one-off messages your software sends and larger campaigns. 1
• Two ways to connect. Software can send through its Mail Send API, with kits in several languages, or through SMTP. 1
• Reporting and templates. It includes campaign analytics, reusable templates and personalisation. 1

What it is

Your software sends more email than you might think: receipts, password resets, booking confirmations, alerts. Sending these from your own server is risky, because receiving mail systems have to be convinced a message is genuine, and a legitimate email that looks suspicious ends up in a junk folder or doesn't arrive at all. SendGrid is an email delivery service that takes on that job. Twilio publishes it, and it claims a 99% deliverability rate. 1

Two standards sit underneath. SMTP, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, is "the basic protocol for Internet electronic mail transport", and it's what SendGrid accepts if your software connects that way. 3 The other is email authentication. DMARC lets the owner of a domain ask receivers to validate that the domain is genuinely being used in a message, say what should happen to messages that fail, and ask for reports. 2 Getting those details right is part of what makes email reliable.

On the practical side, SendGrid sends transactional email (the one-off messages triggered by something a person did) and marketing email at scale. It also gives you campaign analytics and reporting, templates with personalisation, and a way to receive and parse inbound email. 1 Your software can talk to it through its Mail Send API, using kits in several languages, or by SMTP. 1

We choose it because a message that never arrives is a customer who never hears from you, and email delivery is a specialist job that's worth handing to a specialist service.

How we use it

Every app sends email, and you want every one of those messages to reach an inbox. So we've delivered SendGrid integrations that send your software's email through SendGrid, and the messages it generates reach your customers reliably instead of leaving from your own server. If your app also needs calling, Twilio, which publishes SendGrid, covers that too.

That's the heart of Integrations & Automations: joining your systems so information moves between them without anyone retyping it. For you, it means an email goes out the moment something happens in your software, which is the efficiency gains and scalable workflows the service is built around.

References

1. Twilio, "SendGrid", Twilio Docs. https://www.twilio.com/docs/sendgrid (accessed 29 October 2026)
2. T. Herr (Ed.) and J. Levine (Ed.), "Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)", RFC 9989, IETF, 2026. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9989 (accessed 29 October 2026)
3. J. Klensin, "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", RFC 5321, IETF, October 2008. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321 (accessed 29 October 2026)