At a high level, webhooks are a way to send and receive data between two services only when a change has actually happened. This is extremely useful because it cuts down on having to create or manage an always-on connection between two services. This decreases time spent on development, data used, and the potential for errors in transfer.
Many services (Stripe, Twilio, Zapier, Tray.io, and others) already allow users to generate a webhook URL and receive data from a source like Paubox.
Think of the yellow cog in the picture below as a service that a customer might want to push data to and the blue box as Paubox. Notice how the constant polling for new data is completely eliminated with the use of webhooks. Instead Paubox sends a simple, one time payload of data whenever a new email is sent via the API.
Key Features:
- Paubox’s webhook functionality provides a near-instantaneous payload to the service of your choice on the delivery status of any message sent via the Paubox API
- Delivery statuses include:
- Delivered
- Temporary Failure (soft bounce)
- Permanent Failure (hard bounce)
- The payload from a webhook also provides data about the email including:
- Subject
- To
- From
- Date sent
- Message ID
- The data provided from a webhook should be considered PII per HIPAA guidelines
- Paubox can send data to any endpoint that can receive a POST request but note that the payload is not customizable (an example payload can be found here)