Every time somebody fills in a form on your website, an email has to travel from your site to a real inbox. Umbraco writes that message. Actually delivering it is a separate job, and it belongs to an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) service.
There was a time when the web server would just fire the email out itself. That approach is long dead. Gmail, Outlook and the rest are strict about what they'll accept now, and a message that turns up without an authenticated sender behind it gets treated as suspicious at best and dumped in spam at worst. An SMTP service is what proves the email is genuinely from you, so your enquiries land in the inbox rather than the junk folder.
We handle the website side of this. What we can't do is open the account for you, because it's your domain and your sending reputation, so the keys need to be in your hands rather than ours. It also means the logs come to you directly: who received an email, whether they opened it, and whether they clicked anything inside it. That's genuinely useful when someone swears they never got your email.
So the split is simple. You create the account and send us five details. We wire it into your site and test it.
Choosing a provider
You're free to use any provider you like. We recommend SMTP2GO, and we've no affiliation with them, we just find it does the job without fuss.
It's free up to 1,000 emails a month, and 10,000 a month starts at around $15.
The steps below follow SMTP2GO. Other providers are usually structured much the same way, so if you've gone elsewhere specifics will differ - but you'll be looking for the same things.
It takes about five minutes.
1. Register and verify your account
Sign up at smtp2go.com, then click the link in the verification email to confirm your address.
2. Add a verified sender
This is the "from" address your website will send emails as.
Under Sending, click Verified Senders, then Single Sender Emails, then Add Single Sender Email.
If you'd rather send from several addresses on the same domain (hello@yourcompany.com and enquiries@yourcompany.com, say), choose the sender domain option instead and verify the whole domain in one go.
Enter your email address, click Send verification email, then click the link that arrives in your inbox.
3. Create an SMTP user
Still under Sending, click SMTP Users, then Add SMTP User.
Fill in a username and password, set any extras you want such as tracking and status settings, then click Add SMTP User.
If you need those details again later, click the username on the SMTP Users page and SMTP2GO will show you both.
4. Send us five details
That's your part done. Everything we need is on the SMTP Users page, in the Connecting via SMTP panel and behind the username itself:
- SMTP server name, from the Connecting via SMTP panel
- SMTP port number, listed just below it
- SMTP username, click the username to view it
- SMTP password, in the same place as the username
- "From" email address, the verified sender from step two
Send those over to us and we'll add them to your site, including your Umbraco Forms workflows if you have a Forms licence. We'll then submit a test through your own contact form and confirm the email arrives where it should.
Any questions along the way, give us a shout. We'd much rather walk you through it than leave you guessing.
