We want email to feel like the web, modern and cutting edge. This is why we support modern technologies like React for email building and Serverless for sending.

Part of that approach led us to believe all we needed was a great REST API.

Here's a bit of background on why we invested in support of a 40-year-old protocol.

How we got here

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson sent the first email using ARPANET. This became one of the foundational building blocks of the internet as we know it.

10 years later, SMTP was born and has persisted as the standard protocol for sending emails for the last 40 years. Thought much of SMTP has been abstracted into various interfaces, it still remains the standard protocol underlying the 347 billion emails sent every day.

Why SMTP is so special

One reason SMTP integrations are still popular today is because they are provider agnostic, allowing the integration point to be based on the protocol rather than a specific email API.

We noticed quickly that there are still a large amount of systems that rely on SMTP for their integrations. This is true for legacy systems, but also for popular frameworks like Laravel, Rails, Liferay, and Django as well as modern systems like Retool and Supabase that want to provide a quick and standardized way for their customers to send emails.

It was evident that SMTP was not something to avoid, but rather something to embrace.

Send with SMTP today

Today, we are announcing SMTP with Resend.

To configure an SMTP integration, you can simply use these credentials:

• Host: smtp.resend.com
• Port: 465
• Username: resend
• Password: YOUR_API_KEY

See how simple it is to send an email with SMTP and Nodemailer:

For more help with integrating, check our documentation.