Your first message

From an unverified domain to a delivered message, in three steps.

Three steps, and the only slow one is DNS.

1. Add your domain

In the panel, under Domains, press Add domain. Use a subdomain dedicated to sending, mail.mycompany.com and not mycompany.com: whatever happens to the reputation of your sending never touches the rest of your mail.

You choose the stream at that moment, and it does not change later. Transactional is what somebody is expecting to receive; Marketing is what they did not explicitly ask for, and it requires unsubscribe headers.

2. Publish the DNS records

For each record the panel shows you what is published right now and what it should become. Copy the name and the value with the buttons rather than typing them: the panel tells you a record does not resolve, but not which character in it is wrong.

DKIM signs your messages with our key, so the recipient can confirm they came from you.
SPF authorises our servers to send on your behalf. If you already have an SPF record, the panel shows you the merged one: publish a single record, never two.
DMARC tells the recipient what to do with messages that fail authentication, and where to send us the reports.

Once you have published them, press Verify records. Propagation can take up to 24 hours, though in practice it is usually minutes.

3. Send

Create a key under API keys. It appears once; save it in your secret manager.

curl -X POST https://app.c-connect.pt/v1/messages \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CCONNECT_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "from": "notifications@mail.mycompany.com",
    "to": "somebody@example.org",
    "subject": "Your receipt",
    "text": "Thank you for your purchase."
  }'

The answer is 202 Accepted with the message's identifier. Accepted is not delivered: the message has not reached the relay yet, which is why the next step exists.

The part before the @ is yours: notifications@, hello@, noreply@, whatever you want. We check the domain, never the mailbox.

From the key to the first send, and the row that appears in the log.

4. See what happened

Under Messages the row appears, with its status and what the receiver answered. Click the row to open the full timeline: when it was accepted, which MX it went out to, and the SMTP code the recipient gave back.

If you want those events in your own system rather than polling for them, set up an endpoint under Webhooks.