Sending Email with SendGrid

C# provides several ways to send email. Maybe you've used the SMTPClient class or perhaps you've used the Mailkit NuGet package, which is what Microsoft recommends for new code.

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These solutions work well if you need to send a few messages and if you have access to an SMTP server. However, if you need to send lots of messages, you're quickly going to run into things like SPAM filters, daily message send limits and, in the worst case, you might get your domain flagged or blocked.

As a result, many people looking to do bulk email end up using a third-party solution to act as a message broker and send the mail on their behalf. In this article, I'm going to take a look at one of these solutions, SendGrid, which, in my experience, is relatively easy to use, relatively affordable, and which comes with some nice C# utility classes.

Getting Set Up

The first step in using SendGrid is to sign up for a SendGrid account, and SendGrid does provide a free trial. Go to https://sendgrid.​com and click the Start For Free button.

Then, simply follow the sign-up wizard to configure your Twilio account, which gives you access to SendGrid as well as some other Twilio tools.

Once you're logged into SendGrid, you'll land on your SendGrid Dashboard, as shown in Figure 1.

From this dashboard, you can start setting up your prerequisites.

Create an API Key

The SendGrid API is a REST API that is secured with an API key. On the SendGrid Dashboard, expand the Settings item in the sidebar on the left and click the API Keys menu item, as shown in Figure 2. Click the Create API Key button in the upper right corner and walk through the process for generating a new API key Note that when you create a new API Key, SendGrid shows you the actual text of the Key in the confirmation screen, but never again. It's not like Azure Key Vault and other apps where you can click a button to reveal or copy the key value. You need to copy it at this initial step and save it somewhere else or else you'll be forced to create a new key.

Verify a "Single Sender"