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emailsmtpsendgrid

Configuring POP3 with Sendgrid - Can't receive emails but can send them

All I have is an email client (emClient) and a working sendgrid account. When prompted to enter an email address, I can happily put anything@mydomain.com and it will confirm that it works with SMTP. I can also send emails using this client. I authenticate with the username apikey and my api key.

However, these emails are permanently stuck in the "outbox" and are constantly sent over and over again, presumably because the client has no confirmation that they were sent. When trying to set up a new account under this domain, I setup my "incoming server" as smtp.sendgrid.net and provide my credentials and it sort-of works (after prompting me for my authentication?). SMTPAuthenticationOKbutIMAPnot

As you can see, SMTP authenticates just fine and this makes sense as I am seemingly able to send email. However, both IMAP and POP3 when I select them in the "incoming server" are stuck on this "testing" stage until they fail.

Now, if we skip ahead to me sending something out - basically, it works. I receive the email on the destination, it does not get marked as spam and it comes from my domain and my name.

However, when I attempt to receive an email on the anything@mydomain.com one, it just doesn't do anything. I don't get an error from gmail that it wasn't delivered, it simply just doesn't get delivered.

For my domain settings, I have the following configured:

dnssettingsforemaildomain

Solution

  • Twilio SendGrid developer evangelist here.

    While SendGrid allows you to send emails over SMTP or via the API, SendGrid is not a full mailbox that you can connect to over POP3 or IMAP. You cannot connect to SendGrid using an email client, that is not what it is intended for. SendGrid is not a mailbox, but a way to programmatically send and receive emails and other email based events.

    The way to receive incoming emails is via the inbound parse webhook. When you have set that up, incoming emails to your configured domain will cause a webhook, an HTTP request, to be sent to a URL you configured, with all the information about the email.