Introduction

If email providers suspect you of SPAMing, they will place rate limits on your account. For this reason, Apollo implements both daily and hourly send limits to ensure that your email campaigns are sent and delivered successfully.

 

For regular mailbox services (such as Gmail), we recommend sticking to 400 emails per day and 100 emails per hour, then gradually increasing those numbers over time by no more than 100 daily and 20 hourly per week. The max limit that you should never go beyond is 1500 emails/day and no more than 400 emails/hour. More info on that here.

 

Why Use the Apollo SendGrid Integration?

The benefit of SendGrid is that it's designed for higher-volume sending as they use their own servers, so if you're planning on email campaigns with a higher amount of emails than the above mentioned limits, then you would absolutely want to integrate your SendGrid account with your Apollo app. If you integrate your SendGrid account, then you are not limited by the caps indicated in the Email Settings of your app.

 

 

This article contains the following sections:

• Set Up a Sendgrid Account
• Troubleshooting SendGrid Integration with Apollo
• Setup Apollo's Integration with SendGrid
• Configure your SendGrid Account
• Confirm You're Set Up
• Maximize Your Daily and Hourly Send Rates

 

Set Up a Sendgrid Account

Start by creating a new account over SendGrid. When you sign up for a SendGrid account, there are a few steps that you must complete before being able to use your account and integrate it over Apollo.

 

The most important step is to verify your account by doing a Domain Authentication before you launch your mail send into production, to safeguard your account, and maintain deliverability and improve your reputation.

 

Setting up Domain Authentication

Domain authentication shows email providers that SendGrid has your permission to send emails on your behalf.

 

To give SendGrid permission, you point DNS entries from your DNS provider (like GoDaddy, Rackspace, or Cloudflare) to SendGrid. Your recipients will no longer see the “via sendgrid.net” message on your emails. Email service providers distrust messages that don't have domain authentication set up because they cannot be sure that the message comes from you. You are also explicitly showing your recipients that this email comes from you, so they are less likely to mark your mail as spam.

Before you Begin

To set up domain authentication, you must submit the DNS records provided by SendGrid to your DNS or hosting provider (for example, GoDaddy, Hover, CloudFlare, etc.). First, figure out who your hosting provider is and if you have access. If you don't have access to your DNS or hosting provider, you should figure out who in your company has this access before you begin setting up domain authentication.

 

To set up domain authentication:

1. In the SendGrid UI, select Settings > Sender Authentication.
2. In the domain authentication section, click Get Started.
3. Next, add in information about your DNS host, and indicate whether you also want to set up link branding. Click Next. For more information about link branding, check out What is link branding?.
4. Fill in the domain that you want to send from and add advanced settings as needed. Make sure that you only enter the name of your root domain. Do not include www or http://www in this field. Your domain needs to match the domain of your FROM address on the emails you are sending out. For example, if I am sending an email from example@sendgrid.com, I would set my domain authentication domain to be sendgrid.com. Click Next. For more information about advanced settings, see Advanced settings.
5. Next, you need to add all of the CNAME records on this screen to your DNS host. This process varies depending on your DNS host. For videos on how to add your CNAME to some popular DNS service providers, check out these videos. If you don't have access to modify your companies DNS records, you can also email a request to a co-worker. This email includes a direct link to the CNAME records. This link does expire. The recipient doesn't need login access to your SendGrid account.

Tip

GoDaddy, Amazon Route 53, and Namecheap, are among providers that automatically add your domain to your new DNS record values, resulting in a CNAME entry with too much information that fails authentication. An example of this would be em123.yourdomain.com.yourdomain.com.

 

Be sure to check your CNAME for this behavior if your domain doesn't validate initially.

 

Below is an example of the CNAME values under the HOST column as they are displayed and how you will need to enter them into your DNS management with one of these providers:

• HOST/NAME em123.yourdomain.com . ENTER CNAME RECORD HOST/NAME AS: em123
• HOST/NAME s1._domainkey.yourdomain.com  ENTER CNAME RECORD HOST/NAME AS: s1._domainkey
• HOST/NAME s2._domainkey.yourdomain.com  ENTER CNAME RECORD HOST/NAME AS: s2._domainkey

Entries made in the VALUE or POINTS TO field do not need to be changed.

 

Tip

 

• Important Note. It can take up to 48 hours for the records to verify after you upload them into your DNS host, so you will likely have to come back later to verify.

Verifying your DNS

Once you add the CNAME records to your DNS host, return to the Sender authentication page and click Verify.

 

Tip

Any time that you send an email with a FROM address whose domain matches the domain set in the domain authentication, SendGrid applies that domain to your email. You only need to update your domain authentication if you want to update the domain you are emailing from. 

 

Troubleshooting SendGrid Integration with Apollo

It is possible that when you try to link your SendGrid account over Apollo you might receive the error 'We failed to authenticate your Sendgrid account'.

When this happens it is because you must verify on your Sendgrid account ALL domains that are being used as a mailbox over Apollo before being able to complete the integration. Sendgrid will allow you to verify multiple domains.

 

If you have multiple mailboxes and aliases over Apollo to send emails 'From' and all domains from those are not verified over SendGrid, you won't be able to link your SendGrid account to Apollo until you complete this.

 

Find out more about Sender Identify Verification.

Generate & Save Your SendGrid API Key

Before moving onto the Apollo part of the setup, you will need create an API Key from SendGrid by following these steps:

1. Navigate to your SendGrid API Keys Page.
2. Click Create API Key with Full Access or Restricted Access Permissions.
3. If you choose Restricted Access, then please make sure that to enable the following Access Details:
   • Full Access: Mail Send, Mail Settings, Sender Authentication, Tracking
   • Read Access: Email Activity, Stats
     
4. Copy your API Key and make sure to save it somewhere because they will not show you this again, and it will be used in the next section of the article.
   

Setup Apollo's Integration with SendGrid

Once you have received confirmation from SendGrid that all the domains you will be using as mailboxes to send emails have been verified, and after you have generated your API Key, proceed to link your Sendgrid account over Apollo.

1. Navigate to Settings, in the main left menu, and click on Integrations.
2. Choose SendGrid and click on Connect.
3. Enter your SendGrid API Key, and click Link SendGrid.

Enable SendGrid for a Mailbox

To configure a Mailbox to send emails over Sendgrid, use these instructions:

1. Navigate to Settings, over the You option, and click on the Mailboxes tab.
2. Click the down-arrow button to the right of any user mailbox listed, then select Send emails from SendGrid. 

Enable SendGrid As Default for All Users

If you want to turn on SendGrid as the default for all users of your Apollo App, do the following:

1. Navigate to Settings, in the main left menu, and click on Integrations.
2. Choose SendGrid and click on View.
3. Then, click the button Make SendGrid Default for Entire Team.

 

Configure your SendGrid Account

Follow the instructions below to set up SendGrid settings:

1. Open another tab in your browser to your SendGrid account and go to Settings > Mail Settings.
2. At the Event Settings section, click on Event Webhook.
3. Make sure that Event Webhook Status is Enabled.
4. For HTTP Post URL, add https://api.apollo.io/v1/emailer_message_events/log_sendgrid_events.
5. At the Events to be POSTed to your URL, Select Processed, Dropped, Deferred, Delivered, Bounced, Opened, Clicked, Unsubscribed. Unchecking ANY of those boxes will cause potentially unexpected behaviors with your SendGrid tracking:

 

4. Navigate to Settings > Tracking page and Enable Open Tracking and  Click Tracking.

 

• For reference, this SendGrid article goes into some detail on this optional feature. If enabled, you will not be able to deliver SendGrid messages through Apollo.
• If you have enabled the feature previously, be sure to de-activate it to continue sending Apollo emails via SendGrid.
• Our platform no longer users static IP addresses that you can whitelist, so there isn't any way to configure this feature. Our dynamic IP addresses are an enhanced security feature that provides more protection for your Apollo App overall than SendGrid's optional whitelist functionality does, which is why we chose to make that tradeoff. 

 

Confirm You're Set Up

To make sure SendGrid is set up properly, when you add people to a Sequence and select the user to Send Emails From, it'll show (SendGrid) for all Apollo users that have SendGrid enabled.

 

Maximize Your Daily and Hourly Send Rates

Once you've integrated your Apollo app with SendGrid, be sure to increase your daily and hourly send limits to the desired amount by doing the following:

1. Navigate to Settings, over the You option, and click on the Mailboxes tab.
2. From there, click on the mailbox you would like to modify the sending limits.
3. Adjust the Daily Sending Limit and Max # of Emails to Send Per Hour as needed.
4. Once done, click on Save, at the right upper corner.

 

Important Note. Apollo's current maximum sending limit with SendGrid integrated is 6,000 emails per day and 500 emails per hour, per mailbox. This is to maintain the reputation of your account and Apollo's. If you like to send more emails, you can add more mailboxes with the same sending limits.

 

Using SendGrid means you can increase these numbers by more than you would think since there are other factors at work that cause your overall sending numbers do not always reach the actual limit that is set. In addition to the daily and hourly limits, the sequence sending schedules also dictate the window that emails can be sent in conjunction with the contacts' local time zone.

 

Therefore if you're still not seeing the desired results after increasing the daily/hourly caps, you might consider also opening up your sending schedule to allow for more days/hours for emails to be sent out. More on that here.

 

Related Resources

• Apollo Sending Limits and Email Provider Rate Limits