Channels: Email, SMS & WhatsApp
Channels: Email, SMS & WhatsApp
ZingaConnect reaches your contacts over three channels — Email, SMS, and WhatsApp. Before you can send anything, you connect at least one channel by adding a channel configuration: a named account that stores the credentials and settings for one provider.
ZingaConnect is bring-your-own gateway. You supply your own sending credentials for your own provider accounts. ZingaConnect sends through them on your behalf; it does not resell messaging. This means your sender reputation, deliverability, and provider billing stay yours.
How channel configurations work
Each configuration belongs to one channel and one provider, and carries a label you choose. You can have several configurations per channel — for example a "Marketing" and a "Transactional" email account — and mark one per channel as the default.
- Secrets are encrypted. Credential fields (passwords, API keys, tokens) are stored encrypted and are never shown back to you after you save them. Non-secret settings (like your from-address or sender ID) are stored in the clear so you can review and edit them.
- The form adapts to the provider. When you pick a provider, the form shows exactly the fields that provider needs.
- You can test a configuration. ZingaConnect records the result of the most recent test (success or failure, with the error) so you can confirm a channel works before you rely on it.
Supported providers
| Channel | Providers | You supply |
|---|---|---|
| Generic SMTP, Amazon SES, SendGrid | SMTP username/password, SES SMTP credentials, or a SendGrid API key — plus your from-address, from-name, and reply-to | |
| SMS | Twilio, Amazon SNS, MSG91 | Account/API credentials, and your sender number or sender ID |
| Meta WhatsApp Cloud API, Twilio WhatsApp | Access token and phone number details (Meta), or account credentials and WhatsApp sender (Twilio) |
WhatsApp via a Business API provider
WhatsApp messaging runs through the WhatsApp Business Platform. With the Meta WhatsApp Cloud API you connect using an access token and your phone number ID, and can optionally supply an app secret (to verify inbound webhook signatures) and a webhook verify token (for the setup handshake). Twilio WhatsApp is also supported for teams already sending WhatsApp through Twilio.
WhatsApp has additional commerce settings (product catalog, in-chat cart, and WhatsApp Pay) covered in WhatsApp Inbox.
Send rate limiting and daily quota
Every provider caps how fast you may send, and often how many messages you may send per day. Exceeding those limits gets your traffic throttled or your account suspended. ZingaConnect protects you automatically on each channel configuration:
- Send rate — you can set a maximum messages-per-second (
send_rate_per_sec) on the configuration. ZingaConnect meters sends against it. If you leave it unset, a conservative default suited to the provider is used so a fresh configuration never trips the limit out of the box. - Daily quota — you can set an optional per-day cap (
daily_quota). When the day's cap is reached, further sends wait until the next day rather than failing. - Provider back-pressure — if a provider still responds "slow down" or "quota exceeded," ZingaConnect backs off and retries automatically. A throttled message is deferred and retried, never silently dropped.
Because rate and quota are set per configuration, you can pace a bulk marketing account differently from a transactional one.
Programmatic setup
Channels can also be managed over the public messaging API using an API key with the appropriate messaging:* scope. See the Developer API Reference chapter for details.