For every business application to run it's business operations smoothly, one of the key features is to have a reliable communication system between the business and the customers. The communication channel might be two-way, either sending a message to the administrators managing the application or sending alerts to the customers via emails or SMS to their mobile phones.

Azure has integrations with two popular communication services named SendGrid for emails and Twilio for working with SMS. In this chapter, we will be using both the communication services to understand how to leverage their basic services to send messages between the business administrators and the end users.

In this recipe, you will learn how to create a SendGrid output binding and send an email notification to the administrator with static content. In general, there would be only administrators, so we will be hardcoding the email address of the administrator in the To address field of the SendGrid output (message) binding.

We will perform the following steps before moving to the next section:

1. Create a SendGrid account API key from the Azure Management portal.
2. Generate an API key from the SendGrid portal.

In the previous recipe, we hard coded most of the attributes related to sending an email to an administrator as there would be just one administrator. In this recipe, we will modify the previous recipe that sends emails to the user itself that sends a Thank you for registration email.

Make sure that the following are configured properly:

• The SendGrid account has been created and an API key is generated in the SendGrid portal
• An App settings is created in the Application settings of the function app
• The App settings key is configured in the SendGrid output (message) bindings

In most of the applications, you would have requirements of sending emails in the form of notifications, alerts, and so on to the end user. At times, users might complain that they haven't received any email even though we don't see any error in the application while sending such notification alerts.

There might be multiple reasons why users might not have received the email. Each of the email service providers has different spam filters that might block the emails in sending them to the end user's inbox. These emails might have some important information that the users might need. It makes sense to store the email content of all the emails that are sent to the end users, which could be used for retrieving the data at a later stage or for troubleshooting any unforeseen issues.

You will learn how to create a new email...

In this recipe, you will learn how to send a file as an attachment to the registered user. In our previous recipe, we created a log file of the email content. We will send the same file as an attachment to the email. However, in real-world applications, you might not intend to send log files to the end user. For the sake of simplicity, we will send the log file as an attachment.

This is the continuation of the previous recipe. Go through the previous recipes of this chapter just in case you are...

In most of the previous recipes of this chapter, we have worked with SendGrid triggers to send the emails in different scenarios. In this recipe, you will learn how to send notifications via SMS using one of the leading cloud communication platform named Twilio.

In order to use the Twilio SMS output (objsmsmessage) binding, we need to do the following:

1. Create a trail Twilio account from https://www.twilio.com/try-twilio.
2. After successful creation of the account, grab ACCOUNT SID and AUTH TOKEN from the Twilio Dashboard, as shown in the following screenshot. We will create two App...