Considerations when Sending Outbound Emails Through Apex

In a recent post, I went over things to consider when receiving emails using Apex code. In this post, I will go over some tips and considerations you should make when working with outbound emails in the real-world.

• First off, in order to work with outbound messaging in your Sandbox (note that I said Sandbox and NOT Developer edition), you will first need to enable it since it is disabled by default in Sandboxes. You can do this by going to Setup | Email Administration | Deliverability  and changing the Access Level to All Email.
• Even though you can create email templates using text or HTML, as long as you are NOT sending mass emails, consider using Visualforce instead to design a more robust and dynamic email template. I said the part about mass emails because Visualforce cannot be used in these particular situations. But assuming you are just dealing with single emails, then Visualforce can be a great alternative. Refer to this doc for more info on how to use them.
• If you are a Sys Admin or you have permission to “Manage Public Templates”, then you can access the email templates by going to Setup | Communication Templates | Email Templates. Otherwise you can access the ones you have access to by going to Setup |My Setttings | Email | Email Templates.
• Outbound email message limits are based on Greenwich Mean time (GMT) and not necessarily your time zone (unless of course, you live in England). Also, the limits on mass emails vary by your Salesforce Edition. Checkout page 16 of this Limits Cheatsheet for more specific info.
• Even though the limits clearly state that you can send up to 1000 emails per org per day, this only applies to non-Development or non-Trial orgs. Development and Trial orgs are restricted to a far lower number of 10-15 messages per day (depending on when your org was created).
• Most code examples I have seen out there do not show how to use the reserveMassEmailCapacity and reserveSingleEmailCapacity methods from the Messaging class. They can be used to check whether you will exceed the org limit or if the org does not have the right permissions when trying to send either Mass or Single emails. Prior to Winter 14, these methods existed, but for some reason using them still resulted in an unhandled limit exception. Using them should result in a handled exception and this is a much better way of avoiding unexpected outcomes. For example, the following code should now work ok:

try {
    Messaging.reserveSingleEmailCapacity(numOfEmailsToSend);
} catch (Exception e) {
    //handle your exception gracefully
}