I would really appreciate some guidance- I recently discovered that our web host is on an email “black list” from Verizon, Yahoo and Outlook. That explains why a lot of our website users never received email notifications from us - especially when “subscribed” to “conversations”. So, now I am very confused about which kind of email service I need to sign up with just so our users with those particular email providers can actually receive emails. I have looked into MailChimp, Titan, SendInBlue, etc (also cloud flare but I’m not sure if I can actually send bulk emails via cloud flare, looks like its more for receiving and forwarding). Anyway, I need to be able to choose one that will work easily with the “Conversations” block and other emails (Groups) going out from our C5 v9 site. Is anyone else having to deal with this issue and are there any recommendations and changes I will need to make to any concrete5 v9 files once I choose an email service?
What you’re really just looking for is a provider that can send mail via SMTP.
There are lots, Mailgun, Sendgrid, Mandrill (part of Mailchimp), Amazon’s SES, but SendInBlue looks pretty good, and appears to have a pretty decent free tier that might meet your needs.
The approach with any of them is that:
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you create an account, do all the verification steps, and look in the docs/interface for what SMTP credentials to use.
For SendInBlue, you’d follow instructions like this:
https://help.sendinblue.com/hc/en-us/articles/209462765-What-is-SendinBlue-SMTP- -
Once you have your SMTP credentials, in Concrete, search for ’ SMTP Method’ and go to that dashboard page. On that page, change the setting to ‘External SMTP Server’, and a bunch of SMTP fields will appear. In that, you fill in the SMTP details from SendInBlue and save.
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Within this part of the dashboard is a ‘Test Mail Settings’, which can be handy.
When you change it on a site like this, it’s global for all outgoing emails.
The same approach would be if you decided to go with another provider, it’s really just about getting the right SMTP credentials created and input.
Just note that the setup verification steps when you first register an account are critical, in particular ones to do with SPF records - those steps are critical to be able to send correctly, and so that emails that are send through the emailing provider don’t get flagged as spam.
thank you! I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this- it was getting very confusing.