how to get a list of activities from sendgrid? Do they provide some APIs to get responses based on different categories?

Question

In my project I am working with Sendgrid which is used to send bulk transactional or marketing emails. In my project it is working fine. I am able to send transactional emails from my project. But for reading the activities of each email (like open, click, bounce, invalid-emails), I need to go into my sendgrid account and one by one check, which is very tedius and time consuming option. I want to do it automatically in my project. I have read the sendgrid documentation, but I didn't find any way to get a list of OPEN mails, BOUNCED emails. could you please help me, how can I do this.

Answer 1

You need to use the WebHooks built into SendGrid. It's called the Event Webhook.

https://sendgrid.com/docs/API_Reference/Webhooks/event.html

Basically you setup the webhook in SendGrid (go to the Settings -> Mail settings) and click on 'Event Notification'. Turn it on and select the events you're interested in. You can use a site called Request bin to test what happens.

http://requestb.in/

I found the easiest way to test this was to fire an email through SendGrid and then see what it sent through requestb.in. I then wrote the API in my system (C# WebApi) based on the data.

I don't know what language / frameworks you're using but here's my API in WebApi/C#.

Api Controller:

        [HttpPost]
        [Route("api/emailWebHooks")]
        public async Task<IHttpActionResult> UpdateEmail(IList<SendGridNotification> sendGridNotifications)
        {
            Log.Debug("UpdateEmail: " + JsonConvert.SerializeObject(sendGridNotifications));
            var updated = await _sendEmailService.UpdateSendGridEmailState(sendGridNotifications);
            return Ok(updated);
        }

And the class:

    public class SendGridNotification
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// The SendGrid event id
        /// </summary>
        [JsonProperty(PropertyName = "sg_event_id")]
        public string SgEventId { get; set; }

        /// <summary>
        /// The SendGrid message id
        /// </summary>
        [JsonProperty(PropertyName = "sg_message_id")]
        public string SgMessageId { get; set; }

        /// <summary>
        /// The 'event' property. e.g. Processed
        /// </summary>
        [JsonProperty(PropertyName = "event")]
        public string EventName { get; set; }

        /// <summary>
        /// The email id - this is unique argument added when the email was sent
        /// </summary>
        [JsonProperty(PropertyName = "emailId")]
        public string EmailId { get; set; }

        /// <summary>
        /// The email address of the recipient
        /// </summary>
        [JsonProperty(PropertyName = "email")]
        public string Email { get; set; }

        /// <summary>
        /// SendGrid's smtp id
        /// </summary>
        [JsonProperty(PropertyName = "smtp-id")]
        public string SmtpId { get; set; }

        /// <summary>
        /// The timestamp of the email
        /// </summary>
        [JsonProperty(PropertyName = "timestamp")]
        public long Timestamp { get; set; }

        /// <summary>
        /// The IP address - of the server?
        /// </summary>
        [JsonProperty(PropertyName = "ip")]
        public string IpAddress { get; set; }

        /// <summary>
        /// The http response
        /// </summary>
        [JsonProperty(PropertyName = "response")]
        public string Response { get; set; }
    }

SendGrid sends a set of responses so make sure you're API handles a list.

The EmailId in the API is a unique argument I sent to SendGrid so that when this message comes back I know which email the message refers to.

Hope this helps