Transactional Email Deliverability of your Magento Store

The internet started with email and email continues to be a very important means of communication for a Magento site. Emails that are sent directly in relation to an activity on the website such as a registration or purchase – are called transactional emails. Transactional emails occupy a different place in the email marketing category and are governed by less strict rules worldwide.

Importance of Transactional Email for Magento stores

Deliverability of transactional emails is a key to customer satisfaction and loyalty. If a customer requesting a password reset does not get an email in time in the the inbox would result in possibly loosing the customer.

Why is Transaction Email Deliverability a problem?

If email is fundamental to internet why is email deliverability a issue?
In order to protect email infrastructure from spammers, many services created spam lists – IP addresses that have previously been used to spam and are blacklisted. There is no single authority with such lists, leading to the deliverability problem. The IP you get assigned by your cloud provider may not be the clean in all the lists and it is too difficult to find and much more difficult to get cleared. Transactional email providers come to the rescue – their business is to increase deliverbility.

What can be classified by a transactional email?

Newsletters, even opted in, do not classify as transactional email. If you do not send newsletters through Magento, all emails that go out will be transactional.
However, you maybe crossing the line if you send out upsell / crosssell in your email order confirmation for example.

Third party providers

There are many providers and it is a very competitive market a search on google for transactional email will get you many results and comparisons.
Here are a few recently updated comparisons

How to get started with transactional email for Magento?

Check if you have an existing subscription to a transactional email service – indirectly. For example, if you are hosted on softlayer, you may get sendgrid credits. If you use Mailchimp to send newsletters, you may have mandrill credits.
Signup for the service – most of them have a free tier
We think having a Magento plugin is not a requirement if you are self hosted on a VPC or better. Read on, we think using the SMTP service is better option than a plugin or code integration.

Before you install the Magento plugin, read this!

Plugins add a drag to the system – like it or not, each plugin you add, contributes to a slowdown of Magento due to the architecture. Many plugin authors are guilty of passing in additional features into the plugin.
Plugins for transactional emails are “inline” i.e. the email is sent while the purchaser is waiting for a confirmation. That is a dependency on an external system. Occasionally the service may have slowed down and that delay will be added to the wait for the customer.
Local email systems are automatically configured to retry in case of upstream infrastructure failure. If configured at the system level, the email is sent only to the local system, form where it goes into a queue which the systems email service will relay. If for some reason the remote email service is not responding, the queue will remain active and a retry will be attempted after sometime.
Do not select the service based on the availability of a Magento plugin – that is the least important part of the evaluation

How to setup

All providers use TLS for SMTP communication on port 587. It will be required to open port 587 in the firewall to ensure emails be sent out.

Note : Some cloud services notably Google Cloud Platform does not allow communication on ports 25 or 587. For such services you need to use a transactional email service provider that allows SMTP communication over a non standard port.

Use the guide below to get your username and password and then use the steps to setup postfix

For Mandrill

Username : mandrill username
Password : Get Key (Dashboard->Get API Keys->NewAPI Key)
Domain : smtp.mandrillapp.com

For Amazon SES

Username & Password : https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/smtp-credentials.html
Domain (as per region, this is for US West) : [email-smtp.us-west-2.amazonaws.com]:
Domain verification : http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/verify-domain-procedure.html

For Sendgrid :

Get this certificate and store in /etc/postfix/ssl
wget https://certs.godaddy.com/repository/gd_bundle-g2-g1.crt
username : sendgrid account username
password : sendgrid account password

postfix setup

1. Ensure SASL authentication package like cyrus is installed.
2. Ensure you have a FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name). The command hostname -f should report a host.domain type of name. It is preferred you use the domain you are sending from
3. Ensure postfix is installed (and sendmail is not)
4. Edit /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd and enter SMTP_DOMAIN, username and password as per the transactional email platform.
5. chmod 600 /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
6. psotmap /etc/postfix/sasl_passswd
7. edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and add the following to the bottom of the file

# enable SASL authentication
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
# tell Postfix where the credentials are stored
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
# use STARTTLS for encryption
relayhost =<refer platform info>

## For mandrill
smtp_use_tls = no

## For sendgrid
smtpd_tls_security_level = may
smtp_tls_CAfile = /etc/postfix/ssl/gd_bundle-g2-g1.crt

## For Anazon SES
smtp_use_tls = yes
smtp_tls_security_level = encrypt
smtp_tls_note_starttls_offer = yes

restart the postfix service
test by sending an email and watching the result in /var/log/maillog

Transactional Email Deliverability of your Magento Store