Email Services Overview

Backendless provides API for sending out custom email messages to the users of your application. The API is available via REST and in all officially supported SDKs (Android, iOS, JS, .NET). The API supports both plain text-based and HTML-formatted email messages. See the Send Basic Emails API section for details.

Additionally, Backendless supports template-based email distribution. You can design custom email templates and send out personalized email messages customized for each individual recipient. Email recipients can be defined dynamically through a condition/query against the Users database stored in Backendless. Any users returned by the query will be receiving the email.

Alternatively, your application can provide a list of email addresses to the API. Email message customization is made possible through dynamic text placeholders called "smart text". If you are familiar with mail merge, smart text works in a similar manner. Smart text placeholders identify database fields as they relate to users. At the time when Backendless processes email for delivery, it retrieves data from the database and substitutes smart text with the actual data. To learn how to create email templates see the Email Template Management section.

For information about sending out template-based emails see the Send Emails with Templates API section.

At the present moment Backendless requires an external SMTP server for email delivery. This can be a server for your Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. account, or any other valid SMTP server. See the Email Settings section for instructions on configuring your email server.