Azure: Create website and send emails from WordPress hosted Azure web sites

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Last week i started developing my WordPress powered site from Microsoft Azure and the site is running much faster but one thing that i figured out is that how to send emails from WordPress site.  The clear fact is that Windows Azure doesn’t provide you with an SMTP server. So what is the workaround?

SendGrid

What is the SendGrid email service?

SendGrid is a cloud-based email service that provides reliable transactional email delivery, scalability, and real-time analytics along with flexible APIs that make custom integration easy. Common SendGrid usage scenarios include:

  • Automatically sending receipts to customers.
  • Administering distribution lists for sending customers monthly e-fliers and special offers.
  • Collecting real-time metrics for things like blocked email, and customer responsiveness.
  • Generating reports to help identify trends.
  • Forwarding customer inquiries.
  • Processing incoming emails.

For more information, click here.

So lets get start – how to use this feature and enable my site to send emails to…

  1. Log in to the Azure Management Portal.
  2. In the lower pane of the management portal, click New.

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Select Market Place

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Choose SendGrid service from the developer service

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to start with go for the free option, otherwise you can see the pricing options here

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  • Your SendGrid account is now ready and you will see the message Successfull.
  • Your account and credentials are now created. You SendGrid is ready to send emails at this point.
  • Before you get into the other configuration, please take a note on the following values for later use from below screen.
  • To find your SendGrid credentials, Click Connection Info.

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Note down the Username, Password and SMTP details for below configuration usage.

Now that you have an SMTP server ready to use, you need to plug those values into WordPress.

  • I found the WP Mail SMTP WordPress Plug-In to be extremely helpful for this.
  • After you install WP Mail SMTP, you’ll get a new option in your WordPress Settings menu named “Email”.

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Click Save changes and then click test email (If you want to send to multiple email address, separate with comma.

Once you received the test email, you are good to go for website to configure with notifications.

Enjoy…and happy browsing