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Integrations

Setting Up Resend for Email

Connect Resend so your product can send transactional email like confirmations and notifications from your own domain.

Products that send email — booking confirmations, contact form notifications, password resets, welcome messages — use Resend, a developer-friendly email service. You create the Resend account, so deliverability reputation, logs, and billing are all yours.

Create an account and API key

  1. Sign up at resend.com.
  2. In the dashboard, open API Keys and create a key. Name it after your project.
  3. Copy the key (shown once) and paste it into Idea to Life under Settings, then Integrations, then Resend.

Like all keys you store with us, it is encrypted at rest, masked after saving, never sent to your browser, and only decrypted server-side when configuring your deployment.

Verify your sending domain

Out of the box, Resend only lets you send from its test address to your own email — fine for trying things out, useless for real customers. To send real email you must verify a domain you own:

  1. In Resend, open Domains and add your domain (for example yourbusiness.com, or a subdomain like mail.yourbusiness.com).
  2. Resend shows DNS records to add: SPF and DKIM records, and optionally a DMARC record.
  3. Add those records wherever your DNS is managed. If you bought your domain through the Spaceship integration, see the Spaceship guide; the records go in the same DNS panel used for your website records.
  4. Wait for verification. DNS changes usually propagate in minutes but can take a few hours.
Do not skip domain verification for a customer-facing product. Email sent without proper SPF and DKIM alignment lands in spam folders or is rejected outright.

Choosing a from address

Once the domain is verified you can send from any address at it, such as bookings@yourbusiness.com. Tell Idea to Life the from address in the Resend integration settings, or specify it in your blueprint ("send confirmations from hello@..."). Replies go wherever the reply-to is set — if you want replies in your normal inbox, say so and the platform will configure it.

Costs

Resend has a free tier with a daily and monthly sending cap that is enough for many small products. Beyond that it is paid per volume. Check resend.com/pricing for current numbers. Transactional email is cheap at small scale; it is rarely the line item that surprises anyone.

Troubleshooting

  • Emails not arriving: check the Resend dashboard logs first — they show every send attempt and its outcome (delivered, bounced, rejected).
  • Landing in spam: verify SPF and DKIM show as green in the Resend domain page, and add a DMARC record.
  • "Domain not verified" errors from your product: the DNS records are missing or still propagating.