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Get started

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Step 1: Set up your sending domain

Before you can send, you need to add a sending domain. Head over to our domains page for instructions on how to set up your domain.

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Step 2: Create your first channel

Channels allow you to segregate your mail. Some common ways you might want to do this:
  • By environment (e.g., production, staging, etc.)
  • By the type of mail you’re sending (e.g., newsletters, transactional, etc.)
  • By customer (e.g., customer abc)
If something goes awry with your sending (e.g., high bounce rate, high spam, etc.), we’ll only suspend the mail type (transactional or broadcast) on that channel.

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Step 3: Create an API credential or SMTP user

Create a new API credential or SMTP user. If you associate your API credential with a channel, you don’t need to pass in the X-Helo-Channel-Id header shown below. SMTP users are required to be associated with a channel, which will be used during sending automatically.

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Step 4: Send your first email

Option A: Send via API 
curl --location 'https://api.helohq.com/send/transactional' \
--header 'X-Helo-Channel-Id: CHANNEL_ID' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--header 'Accept: application/json' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer API_KEY' \
--data-raw '{
  "from": {
    "email": "test@YOURDOMAIN.COM",
    "name": "From Name"
  },
  "to": [
    {
      "email": "recipient@example.com",
      "name": "Recipient Name"
    }
  ],
  "subject": "Test Message",
  "html": "<html><body><h1>Test message HTML</h1><p>Test message paragraph</p></body></html>",
  "text": "Test message text"
}'
Option B: Send via SMTP For testing with SMTP, we recommend swaks. Below is an example using swaks:
command-line
swaks \
    --server smtp.helohq.com:25 \
    --from test@YOURDOMAIN.com \
    --to recipient@example.com \
    --body "<html><body><h1>Test message HTML</h1><p>Test message paragraph</p></body></html>" \
    --auth LOGIN \
    --auth-user YOUR_SMTP_USER_ID \
    --auth-password YOUR_SMTP_PASSWORD \
    --add-header "X-Helo-TrackLinks: true" \
    --add-header "X-Helo-TrackOpens: true" \
    --add-header "Content-Type: text/html"
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