Getting started

Sendsprite is an email API on top of Amazon SES. Sign in at sendsprite.com or run your own instance; either way you connect your own AWS account, verify a sending domain, and your app talks to /api/v1 — through the sendsprite SDK, plain REST, the CLI, an MCP server or SMTP.

Everything below assumes AWS is connected and one sending domain is verified. If not, start at Domains (self-hosting first, if that is you).

1. Create an API key

Open Dashboard → API keys (/app/api-keys) and create a key. The secret looks like ss_live_… and is shown once — only its SHA-256 hash is stored, so copy it straight into your secret manager.

A key is either full (everything) or sending_only (send and read your own /me), and can be pinned to a single sending domain. See API keys.

2. Send an email

npm install sendsprite

import { Sendsprite } from "sendsprite";

const sendsprite = new Sendsprite();

const { id } = await sendsprite.emails.send({
  from: "Acme <hello@mail.example.com>",
  to: "ada@example.com",
  subject: "Hello from Sendsprite",
  html: "<p>It works.</p>",
});

apiKey falls back to SENDSPRITE_API_KEY, so the constructor usually takes no arguments. Requests go to the hosted instance at https://sendsprite.com; self-hosting, pass baseUrl: "https://<your-instance>" or set SENDSPRITE_URL. Node 20+, ESM and CJS. The package is also the CLI (npx sendsprite emails send …) and ships React email rendering and a Next.js webhook handler — see SDK.

Over REST it is one call, authenticated with Authorization: Bearer <key>:

curl https://sendsprite.com/api/v1/emails \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ss_live_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "from": "Acme <hello@mail.example.com>",
    "to": ["ada@example.com"],
    "subject": "Hello from Sendsprite",
    "html": "<p>It works.</p>"
  }'

A successful send answers 201 { "id": "em_…" } (the SDK returns the same object). The from address must sit on a domain this team has verified, otherwise the call fails with domain_not_verified (422). Every failure is a JSON envelope { "error": { "code", "message", "details?" } }; the SDK throws a SendspriteError carrying the same code and status.

3. Watch it land

Open Dashboard → Emails (/app/emails). Every message has a timeline of the events your instance records for it — queued, sent, delivered, delivery_delayed, bounced, complained, rejected, opened, clicked, failed and cancelled. The same timeline is available over the API with a full key:

const email = await sendsprite.emails.get(id);
email.status; // "queued" → "sent" → "delivered" …
email.events; // oldest first

curl https://sendsprite.com/api/v1/emails/em_... \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ss_live_..."

Other ways in

• CLI — npx sendsprite login, then emails send, emails tail, domains list, templates pull/push. See CLI.
• MCP — npx -y @sendsprite/mcp gives Claude Desktop, Claude Code or any MCP client the same API under the key you hand it. See MCP server.
• SMTP — legacy apps relay through port 587 with STARTTLS, any username and an API key as the password. See Sending → SMTP relay.

Where to go next

• Sending — every field of a send, attachments, tags, scheduling, idempotency, tracking, suppressions and the SMTP relay.
• Webhooks — get the events pushed to your app, signed.
• SDK — the sendsprite package, React email templates and the live change stream.
• API reference — the full OpenAPI 3.1 document, rendered.