Video Tutorial —

How to Enable Slack Notifications with Gravity SMTP

For a written guide on enabling Slack notifications with Gravity SMTP, check out our blog.

Hey there, Dustin here from the Gravity team.

If you send transactional emails from your WordPress site, you’ll want to know if they stop sending.

Email downtime can result in upset customers, lost business, and significant consequences on your revenue.

Gravity SMTP includes a built-in feature that lets you receive Slack notifications upon email failure. Let’s take a quick look at how to set it up.

If I head to the Gravity SMTP settings page, I can enable alerts and then enable the option to send an alert when an email send attempt fails.

I have the option to set the number of failures needed to trigger an alert, as well as set the time interval for sending alerts.

I’ll then toggle on Slack alerts.

Gravity SMTP lets you receive alerts through Slack or by SMS via Twilio, but we are going to focus on Slack for this video. We’ll have a video on setting up Twilio alerts in the near future, so make sure you click that subscribe button so you don’t miss it.

To connect Gravity SMTP to Slack, you’ll need to have a Slack webhook URL.

If you’ve never set up an incoming webhook, don’t worry. Simply follow the link below and choose to create an app from scratch.

Give your app a name, such as Gravity SMTP, and select the Slack workspace you’d like to connect this app to.

Click Create App and then, under Features, select Incoming Webhooks. Toggle on the Activate Incoming Webhooks setting and select Add New Webhook to Workspace.

Then simply specify the channel you want email failure messages to be posted in and click Allow.

Alright, you’ve officially got your webhook set up - now all that’s left to do is connect it to Gravity SMTP.

Copy your webhook URL and head back to the Gravity SMTP settings page to paste it in the webhook URL field. If needed, you can add additional webhooks to send messages to multiple Slack channels, but we’ll only set up one for this video.

Save your settings and you’re all set up! Before we wrap up this video, let’s use the Gravity SMTP Send a Test tool to make sure notifications are sent to Slack.

If I enter a series of numbers in the email address field, I can guarantee that the test email will fail to send. Then I can check Slack and verify that email failure messages are indeed being sent.

That’ll do it for this video, thanks so much for watching! See you in the next video!

Summary

If your emails fail to send, you’ll want to be notified. In this video tutorial, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about receiving Slack notifications upon email delivery failure with Gravity SMTP.

To create your webhook, click here.