Transactional Email - Concepts

DNS propagation is the time a DNS change takes to be updated across the Internet.

IP reputation measures the trustworthiness of an IP address and the amount of unwanted requests it sends. An IP address that sends authentic, spam-free emails, is assigned a good IP reputation. An IP address that sends high amounts of spam or viruses is assigned a bad IP reputation. IP reputation allows you to reject requests that are coming from an IP address with a bad reputation.

A mail exchanger (MX) record is a DNS record that is required to deliver emails to your address. An MX record indicates which mail servers accept incoming emails for your domain and where emails sent to your domain should be routed to.

Scaleway provides its own MX server to improve email deliverability.
However, Scaleway’s MX server is a blackhole. This means that any email sent back to it, will be lost with no possibility of recovery. If you have no MX server, we recommend you use Scaleway’s blackhole MX to avoid getting your emails rejected.

Each MX record has a priority, or a number to designate the order in which your domain’s incoming mail servers receive your emails. The MX record with the lowest number is the first, or primary mail server to which outgoing mail servers attempt to deliver your emails.

A send API is the main API that is used to send transactional emails to recipients.

SMTP relay is the process of transferring an email from one mail server to another.

An SPF record specifies the mail servers that are allowed to send email for your domain. It allows you to protect senders and recipients from spam and phishing attacks. SPF also prevents spammers from sending emails on behalf of your domain.

Transactional Email is a platform that allows you to send transactional emails. Unlike marketing emails, (which are mass distributions of the same marketing message to multiple recipients), transactional emails are personalized emails sent to individuals in response to events they have triggered (e.g. password recovery, billing information, delivery updates, etc).