Emails are critical for many modern applications. Whether you need to send account verification emails, transaction receipts, notifications, newsletters or marketing campaigns, being able to send emails through your app programmatically is hugely beneficial.
Fortunately, there are a number of free email API services that make sending emails easy to integrate at no cost up to a large volume of emails. And, if your email stack lives elsewhere, consider a domain transfer to centralize DNS and email management with one registrar before you verify records. In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know to get started sending automated emails for free through your software.
What is an Email API?
An email API is an Application Programming Interface that allows you to send emails programmatically from within your applications. This allows you to automate email communication instead of sending emails manually.
Most email APIs are web APIs that provide REST endpoints to which you can connect from your application code. You prepare your messages’ data in supported formats like JSON or XML with details like sender, recipients, subject, content and attachments. The email API service will send the emails on your behalf using their email servers.
This means you don’t have to worry about maintaining email servers, dealing with deliverability issues or provider blocklisting. The provider of email service for developers handles all of that for you.
Benefits of Using an Email API
There are many benefits to using a third-party email API, including:
- No Infrastructure to Manage: Email APIs handle the email servers and infrastructure for you.
- Top Deliverability: Most email APIs offer great deliverability “out of the box”.
- Scalability: They can easily scale up to send millions of emails.
- Analytics: Many providers include email tracking and analytics.
- Spam Compliance: Reputable APIs help you meet anti-spam and security standards.
- Easy Integration: Email APIs have simple REST APIs and SDKs for all popular languages and platforms.
Popular Free Email API Services
There are a variety of API services that allow one to send free email to explore, with different feature sets and free usage tiers. Here are some of the most popular options:
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Unione.io
Unione.io is a user-friendly email API service that focuses on delivering a seamless email experience. Their free tier includes:
- 6,000 emails per month
- Up to 500 emails/day (this limit can be adjusted upon request)
- Comprehensive email analytics and tracking
- Real-time event notifications
Easy integration with various systems via SMTP and RESTful API
Unione.io emphasizes deliverability and provides tools to manage the sender’s reputation effectively. They offer 24/7 customer support via email and live chat on their free plans, making them a great choice for developers looking for a straightforward email solution with responsive assistance when needed.
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Mailgun
Mailgun is one of the most popular transactional email services, and it is owned by Rackspace. They offer a generous free tier:
- 10,000 emails per month
- Up to 300 emails/hour
- 2-day message history and analytics
They offer SMTP/API integrations for most languages and frameworks, handle spam compliance, have great deliverability and provide detailed email analytics and event tracking.
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SendGrid
SendGrid is another leading email service owned by Twilio. Their free tier includes:
- 100 emails/day
- 2-day message history
- Email activity feed with opens, clicks, bounces, etc.
They also provide client libraries for many languages, tools to improve deliverability and advanced analytics on your emails.
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Mailjet
Mailjet is a popular European email service focused on transactional and marketing email. Their free tier includes:
- 6,000 emails per month
- 200 emails per day
- Unlimited contacts
- Email templates
- Contact management
- Delivery and open statistics
They offer real-time event tracking, abuse detection and the ability to detect unsubscribes across various devices.
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Elastic Email
Elastic Email has one of the most generous free tiers among transactional email providers:
- 150,000 emails per month
- Unlimited contacts
- Send to 50 different recipients per hour
- View email delivery statuses
- Basic analytical reports
They also have easy SMTP/API integration tools for building email campaigns and protecting the sender’s reputation.
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Amazon SES
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is Amazon’s scalable and highly reliable email service. The free usage tier includes:
- 62,000 emails per month for the first 2 months
- Then 1,000 emails per month, ongoing
SES also provides excellent deliverability, built-in DKIM support, and email templates and is integrated with other AWS services. However, the free tier is relatively limited.
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Mailchimp
Mailchimp is actually a full marketing automation platform but also provides transactional email capabilities with a free tier that includes:
- 2,000 emails per month
- Automation for sending multi-email workflows
- Basic analytics on emails
- Easy opt-in management
The free tier is focused on newsletter emails rather than transactional. But Mailchimp can still be useful for some application email needs.
How to Integrate an Email API
Once you’ve chosen an email API service, integration with your application code consists of three main steps:
1. Sign Up and Configure Your Account
First, you’ll sign up for a free account on whichever API provider you selected. Make sure to confirm your email address and set a strong password.
In your account, you’ll need to configure the sending (“From”) email address and domain. Most providers require verifying the domain ownership.
You’ll also need to review your account’s spam guidelines and policies to make sure your emails align with recommended best practices around content, consent, unsubscribes, etc.
2. Install the Client Library
Nearly all email API providers offer client libraries and SDKs for easy integration with popular programming languages and frameworks.
For example, Mailgun offers client libraries for Node, Python, PHP, Ruby, C#, Java and Go. The libraries handle lower-level details so you can focus on constructing and sending messages.
Follow the documentation to install the appropriate library for your platform. The library will provide methods to connect to the API and easily construct emails.
3. Send Test Emails
Once set up and connected via the library, have your code send some test emails to confirm everything is working. Make sure to check spam folders as well in case messages are incorrectly filtered.
Most email services sandbox accounts until verified, so you’ll need to request production access after confirming functionality.
With that, you’re ready to start sending automated emails at scale!
Email API Use Cases
Here are some common examples of how applications leverage email APIs:
User Onboarding Emails
- Confirmation for email/password resets
- Multi-message welcome series
Transactional Receipts
- Order confirmations
- Shipping & delivery notices
- Billing or payment emails
User Notifications
- New comment/message notifications
- Alerts when the server is down
- Notification of status changes
Newsletters
- Periodic digests of new content
- Promotional email campaigns
- Event reminder blasts
Automated Workflows
- Drip campaigns for free trial users
- Email rating reminders
- Appointment follow-ups
Monitoring Alerts
- Error, crash or outage alerts
- Threshold warning notifications
- Security intrusion alerts
The use cases are nearly endless. Anywhere you need to communicate or notify users, automating emails via APIs is easy and free.
Key Takeaways
- Email APIs make sending automated emails easy from within your applications
- There are quite a few excellent free email API options to explore
- Typical use cases include onboarding, transactions, notifications, newsletters and workflows
- Integration consists of configuring an account, installing a code library and testing
- Be sure to follow best practices around email content, consent and frequency
Leveraging email APIs allows sending critical communications without managing email servers by yourself. This allows small dev teams to build powerful applications with automated messaging at scale.
Hopefully this overview gives you a better understanding of how to start sending automated emails for free!