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How to receive email event feeds

This how-to guide covers how to add reporting on email send, delivery, bounce and complaint events to Google Sheets for generating Sheets which can be shared with Service Management teams. This guide does not cover adding data sources to Looker Studio for generating reports although Service Management teams may want to investigate using Looker Studio if they want to generate more "dashboard"-style real time reporting.

An example email event feed in a Connected Sheet.

Register your service

Your service must have been registered with the User Notify service. As part of that process you identify reporting IAM principals which correspond to Google users who will be able to add and query event feeds from a Google sheet. Ideally those principals should be Lookup groups specified as group:{numeric-id}@groups.lookup.cam.ac.uk. Members of those Lookup groups will be able to add email event feeds to Sheets.

Alerting on email events

The reporting IAM principals will also be able to run BigQuery queries over your email logs. Advanced users may wish to have a scheduled task run to raise alerts if emails start bouncing. Suggestions for how to do this are covered in a Stack Overflow question.

Create a data connection in your Sheet

  1. In a Google Sheet, select Data > Data connectors > Connect to BigQuery.
  2. Choose User Notify - prod from the list of projects.
  3. Select the email_events data set.
  4. Select the table corresponding to your service. It will be named service-ses-events-{service-id} where {service-id} is the id of the service as registered with the User Notify service.
  5. Click Connect.
  6. Select the filter icon next to publish_time and choose Sort Z to A to see the most recent events first in the preview.

You may now generate extracts, charts and pivot tables from your email event feed. Watch the tutorial video below to learn more.

A tutorial video showing how to use Connected Sheets.

Next steps