Do you choose the best way to send emails for your application?

Sending email from your application is easy, most programming languages allow you to send an email. Formatting and getting proper feedback and data on your emails is a bit more complicated.

Enterprise software generally need to send emails for a range of reasons e.g. inviting users, multifactor authentication, registering users, marketing campaigns, so it is important to know the best ways to send an email.

1. Built-In Email commands

Generally, programming languages have a built-in way to send email e.g. PowerShell with Send-MailMessage and System.Net.Mail in .Net, and those commands generally use an SMTP server (external or internal). If you need a quick and dirty email, this is a good way.

2. Microsoft Graph API - Microsoft Recommended

Microsoft's recommended way of sending mail is through the Graph API. This is much more secure than just using any built-in commands and the command itself to send it is not much more complicated. You can check how to send email through the Graph API

3. Sendgrid - Recommended if you need a lot of features

Another way to send email is to use a third-party solution e.g. Sendgrid that gives you many more features over the normal email-sending mechanisms above e.g:

• Integrated API
• Click tracking
• Spam management