Webhooks

Webhooks let you receive real-time notifications when email events occur — delivery, bounce, open, complaint, etc. RelayPost sends an HTTP POST to your endpoint with event details.

Set up a webhook

Configure webhooks in the RelayPost dashboard under Settings → Webhooks:

1. Enter your endpoint URL (e.g. https://yourapp.com/webhooks/relaypost)
2. Select the events you want to receive
3. Save and copy the signing secret for signature verification

Event types

Event	Fired when
queued	Email accepted and added to the delivery queue
processing	Email is being sent to the recipient’s mail server
delivered	Email successfully delivered
opened	Recipient opened the email
bounced	Recipient’s mail server rejected the email
deferred	Temporary failure — will retry
failed	All delivery attempts exhausted
complained	Recipient marked the email as spam
rejected	RelayPost rejected the email before sending

Webhook payload

Each webhook POST contains a JSON body:

{
  "event": "delivered",
  "email_id": "abc123",
  "message_id": "<[email protected]>",
  "recipient": "[email protected]",
  "timestamp": "2026-02-13T12:00:00.000Z",
  "metadata": {
    "mx_host": "mx.example.com",
    "smtp_code": 250,
    "smtp_message": "OK"
  }
}

Verifying webhook signatures

Each webhook request includes a signature header for verification. Validate it to ensure the request came from RelayPost and wasn’t tampered with.

import { createHmac, timingSafeEqual } from "node:crypto";

function verifyWebhook(payload, signature, secret) {
  const expected = createHmac("sha256", secret).update(payload).digest("hex");
  return timingSafeEqual(
    Buffer.from(signature, "utf-8"),
    Buffer.from(expected, "utf-8"),
  );
}

Caution

Always verify webhook signatures in production. Without verification, anyone could send fake events to your endpoint.

Retry policy

If your endpoint returns a non-2xx status code, RelayPost retries the delivery:

• Up to 3 retry attempts
• Exponential backoff between retries
• After all retries fail, the delivery is logged as failed

Best practices

• Return a 200 response quickly — do heavy processing asynchronously
• Use webhook signatures to verify authenticity
• Store events idempotently — you may receive the same event more than once
• Monitor your webhook endpoint’s uptime — missed events aren’t replayed automatically