Modern Email

Let’s talk about email.

Over the last couple of years, email has become a significant pain point for more and more people in Nova. A quick search through our forums shows countless threads that deal with a whole host of email issues:

• “No one gets emails sent by Nova”
• “Some users get the emails sent by Nova, but others don’t”
• “Some emails from Nova take hours to arrive”
• “I get an error when Nova tries to send emails”

Clearly, something needs to be done about emails, but what?

Shared hosting today is a total crapshoot. Some people have had great experiences with shared hosting (like a2 or Arvixe or Dreamhost, etc.) while others have had miserable experiences (I’m looking at you 1-and-1 hosting). Every shared host seems to set their systems up differently and it leads to a lot of headaches, especially when it comes to getting email working reliably with Nova. So how do we fix this issue?

Third-Party Email Service Providers

The answer I’ve been advocating for a while now is using third-party email service providers. These are companies that offer to handle the sending of emails from a system (like Nova) to whatever recipients are on the email. I would highly encourage users to use a third-party email service provider, and here’s why:

1. They specialize in sending emails
2. They will increase your deliverability rate, often dramatically
3. Your emails are less likely to be labeled as “spam” and/or blocked completely (quite common)

Who’s Out There?

It can be a little daunting to step into the world of third-party email service providers, so here’s a little primer on who’s out there, ranging from completely free services to some that charge you monthly for the number of emails you send.

• SendGrid
  Offers a 30-day trial that includes 40,000 emails. After that, it’ll cost you $9.95 per month for up to 40,000 emails.
• Mailgun
  Offers 10,000 free emails per month and includes an API that Nova NextGen is setup to use if you so choose.
• Postmark
  Offers 25,000 free emails to start, but you’ll be charged per email after that (about $1.50 for every 1,000 emails after your initial 25,000 free emails). The good thing is that even if you send about 1,000 emails a month from your Nova site, you’ll only pay $1.50 every two years or so.
• SparkPost
  Offers 100,000 free emails per month and includes an API that Nova NextGen is setup to use if you so choose.
• SendPulse
  $8.85 per month for 25,000 emails.
• MailJet
  6,000 emails per month for free, but there’s a daily sending limit of 200 emails.
• SendinBlue SMTP
  9,000 emails per month for free.
• ElasticEmail
  150,000 per month for free.

It’s important to understand that there may be additional work that has to be done for some of these services. For example, Mailgun requires domain verification before you can send emails. While it’s a technical process, Mailgun has documentation that will walk you through updating the DNS records. In other cases, these are relatively new services that we don’t have much information on. We encourage people to look at the different options and make decisions based on what they think their needs will be.

What About Nova 2?

All this talk about Nova NextGen is all well and good, but a lot of people are having issues with email in Nova 2 now. What about those folks? Fortunately, any of the above SMTP services will also work in Nova 2. If you’re having issues today with emails not being delivered, you can get up and running in short order by signing up for one of the above services and plugging in the details in your email config file in Nova 2.

In order to get Nova 2 working with your SMTP service of choice, you simply need to update the application/config/email.php config file with the information you got from the service when you signed up:

$config[‘protocol’] = ‘smtp’;
$config['smtp_host'] = 'http://smtp.example.com';
$config['smtp_user'] = 'username';
$config['smtp_pass'] = 'password';
$config['smtp_port'] = 25;

Save the file and upload it back to your server and you should be all set! You can run a test by using the contact form to send something to yourself. If everything is working, you should get the contact page email like normal. If you don’t get the email, you may need to use the SMTP service’s dashboard to figure out if the email got to the service. (This goes back to what we talked about earlier about some services requiring additional setup in order to get it working properly.)

If you’ve an SMTP service and gotten it working with Nova 2, be sure to drop by the forums and let people know any gotchas you ran into.