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

Azure can integrate with two popular communication services: SendGrid for emails, and Twilio for working with SMS. In this chapter, we will be using both of these communication services to learn how to leverage their basic services to send messages between business administrators and end users.

Following is the architecture that we will be using for utilizing Send Grid and Twilio Output bindings with Http Trigger and Queue Trigger:

In this recipe, you will learn how to create a SendGrid output binding and send an email notification, containing static content, to the website administrator. Our use case only involves one administrator, 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 on to the next section:

1. Creating a SendGrid account API key from the Azure Management portal
2. Generating an API key from the SendGrid portal
3. Configuring the SendGrid API key with the Azure Function app

In the previous recipe, we hardcoded most of the attributes related to sending an email to an administrator, as there was just one administrator. In this recipe, we will modify the previous recipe to send a Thank you for registration email to the users themselves.

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 configuration is created in the Application settings of the function app.
• The App settings key is configured in the SendGrid output (message) bindings.

Most of the business applications of automated emails are likely to involve sending emails containing 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 from the end user's inbox. But these emails might have some important information that the users might need. It makes sense to store the email content of all of the emails that are sent to the end users, so that we can retrieve the data at a later stage, for troubleshooting any unforeseen issues.

In this recipe, you will learn how to create...

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 a continuation of the previous recipe. If you are reading this first, make sure to go through the previous recipes...

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

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

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