3

Does azure not have a native transactional email service which we can make use of? Currently all aspects of my platform are hosted within azure. Just feels silly going off to a 3rd party for such a simple task.

Zapnologica
  • 22,170
  • 44
  • 158
  • 253
  • 1
    Azure has a partnership with SendGrid. You can purchase a subscription for it through Azure Marketplace (provided it is supported in your Azure Subscription). – Gaurav Mantri Apr 25 '16 at 12:48

1 Answers1

3

The problem with the email software in the cloud that it there can be the sitation when the Azure security perimeter will block the traffic or mark it as a spam or many other situations. Especially when you do not have the dedicated IP address (in Azure, btw, you can).

I know about three options - i tested first two, and it works:

1) SendGrid partner offering has 25 000 free emails/month. Tutorial. Simplest way.

2) Less simple is to use external SMTP provider and something like System.Net.Mail. It works, but again, should be tested. It is not guaranteed that your server will not be blocked.

3) Set up the mail server and set up the reverse DNS.

I heard that some folks set up the IIS SMTP service. Did not do it by myself, but i expect that it will involve some extra infrastructure efforts.

I would highly recommend you to not place SMTP server inside of the cloud, but instead of that use some external one. But it can be set up and should work.

Alex Belotserkovskiy
  • 4,012
  • 1
  • 13
  • 10
  • 1
    I can't recommend SendGrid. Setting up an account took days. SendGrid wouldn't validate our DNS records. Support figure it out only after repeated requests, and recomended to disable default functionalities of our account to bypass the problem. Same story 3 months later when we had to migrate to a separate account due to unreliable integration with Azure Additionally, the .net API is confusing and lacks transparency in many ways. Finally, today is the 3rd day ALL our emails are deferred because of "changes to our infrastructure that MAY throttle SOME of your emails" . We're fully in the mud! – BernardV Jul 23 '16 at 15:13
  • We got issues with blocked IPs with the free account, and later with the low fee account.. – eyal_katz Dec 03 '20 at 18:45