MailChannels Email API: transactional email for platforms

MailChannels Email API is a transactional email delivery API for platforms with many senders. It helps you authorize downstream senders, contain abuse quickly, and keep legitimate mail flowing across shared reputation. Most developer email tools are optimized for a company sending its own mail. MailChannels is built for apps where your users, tenants, customers, or agents send through your product.

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How it works

Your application calls the MailChannels API endpoint with the message details: sender, recipients, subject, and body. MailChannels validates the request against your domain configuration, evaluates sender-risk signals, applies the right controls, and delivers accepted messages to the recipient’s mail server. The API uses standard JSON over HTTPS, so you can integrate it from any language or platform that can make HTTP requests.

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Choose the right starting point

Use the path that matches what you are building:

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Key benefits

Authorize downstream senders. Domain Lockdown™ ties each sending domain to your account so another customer cannot send through MailChannels as that domain. Detect risky senders. Behavioral scoring, content signals, recipient feedback, and sender history help identify the source of risk before one sender’s behavior becomes everyone’s delivery problem. Contain abuse fast. Sub-accounts, sending limits, suppressions, suspensions, and policy enforcement keep abuse scoped to the sender or tenant causing the problem. Keep good mail flowing. Shared reputation stays protected so legitimate senders can continue delivering while your operators investigate and remediate the source of abuse. Operate with evidence. Signed webhooks, delivery events, metrics, and troubleshooting data give abuse, support, and engineering teams the signals they need to act.

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What you need to get started

Before you can send your first email, you need three things:

1. A MailChannels account, created at dash.mailchannels.net
2. An API key with the api scope, generated in the Console
3. A Domain Lockdown DNS TXT record for each domain you send from

The quickstart guide walks you through each of these steps and ends with a working example.

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Production checklist

Before you send production traffic, verify each item:

• Store your API key in a secrets manager or environment variable.
• Add a Domain Lockdown record for every domain used in the from.email field.
• Publish SPF for each sending domain.
• Configure DKIM signing and publish the DKIM DNS record.
• Add a DMARC record, starting with a monitoring policy such as p=none.
• Create a webhook endpoint and store delivery events for operational troubleshooting.