Email Destinations

Event Notifications provides the followng two Email Destination types.

Inbuilt Email Inbuilt Email destination provides a SMTP relay for sending transactional and informational event notification emails to recipients who need to be aware of events that happen within your IBM Cloud account. This destination can be used to send email notifications for events originating only from IBM Cloud sources. The content cannot be modified within Event Notifications. This destination is provided out of the box, and is available whenever you create an instance of Event Notifications. These emails originate from no-reply@cloud.ibm.com or event-notifications@cloud.ibm.com, while you can add your own reply-to address.
IBM Cloud Email service with custom domain Custom Domain Email destination empowers you to tailor your communication by adding your own domain. You now have the flexibility to send emails using the email address associated with your specific domain, creating a personalized touch to your correspondence, by sending your own email content. In addition, this destination type also supports Email Templates and Personalization.

Adding an email service destination

Upon the creation of a new Event Notifications instance, you will notice the presence of the pre-configured IBM Cloud Email Service in the destination tab. This pre-configured email destination is poised to meet your immediate communication needs, providing a hassle-free setup for instant usability. Follow the detailed steps to get started with default domain email destination.

If you would like to send your own content in the email or send emails from your own domain, then choose Custom Email. Click on Add destinations, and selectCustom Email destination to create a new destination. Follow the detailed steps to get started with custom domain email destination.

Read through and follow the suggested etiquettes when utilizing the IBM Cloud email service.

Subscription workflow

Both the Event Notifications Email Destinations support a subscription workflow. This workflow triggers an invitation email to all email-ids which are subscribed to an Email Destination. The invitation contains a link to accept further notification from the subscription. All notificaiton emails will be sent to the subscribed email-id only if the recipent accepts the invitation.

The followiing diagram shows depicts the workflow, from invited to subscribed and to unsubsubscribed.

Email state-diagram — Email state diagram

Unsubscribe

You can subscribe to or unsubscribe from specific Event Notifications email notifications. Also, users can opt out of receiving notifications for any subscription.

The Active tab displays the list of recipients email addresses and the date activated. The Unsubscribed tab displays the list of recipients who don't want to receive any email notification.

To unsubscribe, do the following steps:

Under email subscription, click the Unsubscribed dialog to modify subscription settings and unsubscribe from mailing lists.
Select or deselect the Unsubscribed dialog, which automatically reflects in the subscription wizard.

The role of an Admin:

Only an admin can move or modify an unsubscribed email ID to Active.
Only an admin can clear unsubscribed email lists.
An admin cannot manually move or add users to the unsubscribed list.

Email charges

Every message that is sent by the IBM Cloud email service counts as one outbound digital message and is charged. For example, if a subscription has 100 email addresses and the subscription topic received 1000 events during the month is as follows:

Total Outbound Digital messages = (number of email addresses) x (topic events)

In the example, the total outbound digital messages are as follows:

100 x 1000 = 100000 outbound digital messages

You are charged for messages that are successfully sent by the IBM Cloud email service regardless of whether the remote email server successfully delivered the message to the recipient. For example, bounced emails still count as outbound digital messages. So vet your email list carefully to prevent unnecessary charges.

You can monitor your email usage by setting up a monitoring dashboard through the Actions menu of the Event Notifications dashboard. See Monitor Event Notifications service metrics with IBM Cloud Monitoring for details.