What is it?
Email Relay is an add-on to Beamery’s email infrastructure. This add-on enables a customer to handle the final mile delivery themselves. Customers who go for this kind of implementation usually do so because they don’t want to delegate sending from the domain they want to use to third-party gateways like Sendgrid.
Why an add-on?
Beamery’s only partner for email communication is Sendgrid. Our communications infrastructure only supports sending emails through Sendgrid and our tracking capabilities work in tight connection to Sendgrid’s tracking features.
The purpose of this solution is to enable us to use our existing Sendgrid integration and all the Sendgrid features we rely on for tracking.
How does it work?
For companies that choose Email Relay, Beamery applies two transformations to outbound emails.
- The first transformation happens before the email is sent and is needed for emails to get routed to Email Relay instead of the recipient’s inbox
- The second transformation happens inside the Email Relay and is needed for emails to get correctly delivered to the recipient by the external SMTP that’s handling the last mile
Other considerations
End-to-end delivery tracking gets lost with the use of Email Relay, because our delivery information will be given by delivery to the Email Relay. To use Email Relay the customer is required to track the delivery on the last mile themselves.
Tracking for clicks and opens will continue to function as expected as long as tracking by Sendgrid is accepted by the customer.
Reply tracking will also continue to function as expected as long as reply emails reach Beamery.
The customer must ensure it has sufficient capacity for sending emails through their external SMTP.
This solution relies on reply-to for reply routing. If a different domain for reply-to is not acceptable, then the customer must be able to forward replies back to Beamery.
Email relay specific security features
Email Relay uses secret leak detection and container scanning to ensure nothing unexpected is stored or deployed.
Sensitive authentication credentials are stored using SOPS/KMS and available only to the email relay service.
We use a dedicated domain and DKIM key associated with the customer Beamery instance to send messages between the Beamery mail service and Email Relay. Email Relay validates that domain/DKIM signature to ensure we only relay messages originating from one customer’s Beamery instance can be relayed.
Where supported, we use TLS to connect to the customer SMTP service.