Getting started

From the first login to the first email sent.

Five steps, all from the panel. They take five minutes, plus the time to get hold of the credentials of your SMTP server.

1. Sign in

An instance with no account yet offers to create the first one: that is the bootstrap, and it closes as soon as somebody uses it. From then on the sign-in page only signs in, and further accounts are created from the command line by whoever administers the service:

docker compose run --rm app node dist/server/db/manage-users.js create alice a-long-password

2. Create a project

One project per application, or per customer. Its SMTP settings take host, port, TLS, authentication type, credentials and sender address.

Without host, port and sender the project cannot send and every send answers 409. The password is stored encrypted and never comes back out of any API: the panel only shows whether there is one, and saving with an empty field leaves it as it was.

3. Write a template

Complete HTML, with placeholders where the data goes. The Templates page explains how substitution works and what happens to a placeholder with no data.

4. Generate an API key

Inside the project. The whole value is shown once, at creation time: after that only the first characters stay visible, enough to recognize it in the list. If you lose it you generate another one and revoke the old one.

The key goes in the environment variables of the server that sends, never in the browser.

5. Try it from the inside

Send an email from the panel before writing a line of code: it uses the same route, authenticated with the session instead of the key, and with the project picked by hand. If it arrives, the SMTP configuration is right and the next problem will only be in your code.

Then move on to Sending.