Bird

What Bird Email is

Bird is a communications platform built for developers, and Bird Email is its email product: an API for the receipts, password resets and product notifications an application sends, with marketing campaigns, an SMTP relay and inbound email available as the product grows. The home page describes Bird as communications infrastructure for sending and receiving across email, SMS, WhatsApp and voice with "One API, one contract," on a network it says carries 40% of the world's commercial messages by volume. It adds that the team building the API has been running this infrastructure for 15 years.

The SparkPost address now leads to this Bird Email page, and the resources menu has a section called SparkPost and Bird for customers who want to understand the two products and plan their next step. This entry covers the email product; the other channels matter here mainly because they share its API.

Sending from an application

The core is a send API with SDKs for Node.js, Python, Go and PHP, plus a CLI and plain cURL. The home page shows the same client dropped into Express, Next.js, NestJS, Fastify, Nuxt, Hono, Bun, Astro, Koa and Remix. The email page promises 5 minutes from npm install to first send, and the first message can go to a sanctioned test address (delivered@messagebird.dev), so a developer can build against the live API, webhooks included, before verifying a domain.

Messages can be built two ways. Bird renders a stored template with Liquid, or the application renders React Email to HTML and passes the result; HTML and plain text both work. Stored templates are versioned and personalized per recipient at send time. A batch call carries up to 100 independent messages, each with its own recipient and variables, under one idempotency key.

The FAQ covers the practical details. Transactional and marketing mail go through the same send API, and a category field decides how suppressions and unsubscribes apply, so a password reset is sent as transactional and a campaign as marketing. A send can be scheduled with scheduled_at anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 days ahead and canceled at any point before it goes out. Attachments travel as base64, inline images use a content_id referenced with cid:, raw files should stay at or below 15 MB so the encoded message fits the 20 MB cap, and executable and script content types are refused before the send.

Applications that already speak SMTP can use the SMTP relay, which connects them to a regional SMTP host with an API key. Inbound email works through a Bird-generated forwarding address or MX records on a subdomain you own, and each message arrives as a signed webhook you can thread. Agent mailboxes go a step further: code claims an address, receives mail into threads and replies over the API, which Bird aims at AI agents.

Campaigns, contacts and templates

Bird Email is not only transactional. The campaigns side covers email marketing (create, personalize and measure campaigns), broadcasts that can be drafted, targeted, scheduled and sent from either the dashboard or the API, contact profiles with audiences built from them, and reusable templates shared between campaigns and API sends. Unsubscribes through a tracked link and one-click unsubscribes from the recipient's mail client each arrive as their own webhook event, and an unsubscribe is recorded as a preference separate from bounce and complaint suppressions. The pages describe these tools in a few lines and give far more space to the API, which says something about the intended user.

Deliverability and insights

The email page lists ten parts of email that Bird takes off the sender's hands. Domain authentication needs three records: DKIM, a return-path CNAME and a DMARC policy, with the CNAME covering SPF so nothing has to go on the domain apex. Bird re-checks a new domain on its own until the records resolve, usually within minutes of DNS propagating, and a verify call gives an immediate answer. An audit tool resolves any domain's live DMARC, SPF, DKIM, BIMI and MX records, grades how they work together and ranks what to fix, with no account needed.

Dedicated IPs are provisioned per account, organized into pools you control and warmed automatically over roughly 30 days. The home page adds direct sending IPs and ISP-aware routing. Hard bounces and complaints create category-aware suppressions, and every message sits in a searchable log with its delivery events, queryable by ID.

Reporting breaks out bounce codes, complaint types and mailbox-provider and client data per domain, ISP and IP, in the dashboard and through a stats API, with engagement reported separately from delivery. Two further tools sit on top: Inbox Insights estimates inbox placement and runs seed tests for verified domains, and Competitive Insights lets a sender research competitors' campaigns, their sending cadence and panel-estimated placement. Email validation runs through Bird's Lookup product, so an address can be checked before it enters a sending workflow.

Companies that want their own infrastructure are covered too. The enterprise section offers managed sending, PowerMTA for operating a mail transfer agent on your own servers, and Momentum for policy-driven messaging infrastructure.

Webhooks, idempotency and the developer side

Every state change is a webhook: email.accepted, processed, delivered, opened, clicked, bounced (with bounce type and SMTP code), complained, unsubscribed and list_unsubscribed. Payloads follow the Standard Webhooks spec with HMAC-SHA256 signing, per-endpoint secrets, a 5-minute replay window and a 24-hour dual-signing overlap when secrets rotate. A failed delivery gets eight attempts over roughly 27.5 hours with jittered backoff, each reusing the same webhook-id so deduplication works, and a replay call recovers anything that still failed. Attempt logs are built in.

An Idempotency-Key header works on every POST, PATCH and DELETE. A replayed request returns the original result with an Idempotency-Replay header, and reusing a key with a different body returns a 409 rather than a second email. Errors share one envelope with a docs link on every code, lists use cursor-based pagination, and IETF RateLimit headers appear on every response, not only on a 429. Keys use a prefix and fingerprint format, are scoped to send or manage and to read or write, and several can be live at once for rotation. A test mode simulates delivered, bounced, complained and queued states without spending budget or reaching a real recipient. The whole public API is also published as a Postman collection generated from the same OpenAPI specification as the SDKs.

Bird also leans into AI coding tools. A hosted MCP server, or a local one run through the bird CLI, gives Claude or Cursor typed tools across every channel with scoped keys and full audit, and setup prompts for Claude Code, Cursor and Codex install the CLI and skills.

Other channels on the same API

The home page makes the case for Bird over an email-only service: SMS, WhatsApp, voice and Realtime share the email API's auth model, idempotency contract, error envelope and webhook shape, so a handler written for email already parses SMS and WhatsApp events. SMS runs on tier-1 carriers in 190+ countries, with A2P 10DLC application and brand vetting in 48 hours, alpha sender IDs, DLT entity registration, voice OTP fallback (opt-in per account) and segment-accurate pricing in each response. WhatsApp uses the official Cloud API with templates, interactive buttons, media and read receipts. Voice, which the page says is being upgraded, connects a PBX over SIP trunks, and Realtime, a hosted pub/sub service over WebSockets, is free to use while it is in preview. The product menu also lists Apple Messages, Verify, Lookup, RCS, Push and eSIM.

Pricing, onboarding and support

The email page says Bird Email is "Priced per 1,000 emails." It points to published email rates on a full pricing page and suggests comparing the total for your sending volume, plan and any dedicated IP requirement before starting a migration; the home page sums up the model as "Pay only for what you use." The Start for Free sign-up gives a test API key immediately, and production sending opens once you add a payment method and verify a sender.

Higher-volume senders and migrations go through sales. Bird's email team offers demos and talks through sending volume and pricing, domains, dedicated IPs and deliverability, and the integration and migration plan. The documentation includes a getting-started path, FAQs, explainers, setup guides, a comparison of email providers and migration guides for moving an integration and sending configuration from another provider; the page notes that these resources are in English. The footer links a Trust Center, a status page and a support contact. Zillow's customer story reports a 161% increase in email open rates in the first month after it moved time-sensitive property alerts to Bird.

Who it suits

Bird Email fits developers and product teams sending application mail who want current API conventions: idempotent requests, signed webhooks, a test mode, SDKs in their language and an MCP server for coding agents. It suits teams that also send SMS or WhatsApp verification codes and notifications, since one API contract covers all of them, and it gives existing SparkPost customers their own section in the resources. Senders who watch inbox placement get seed tests, competitor research and managed dedicated IPs in the same account, and companies that want to run their own MTA have PowerMTA and Momentum.

A marketer who wants a visual campaign tool first and an API second will find the campaign features present but described only briefly, so Bird Email fits a team with developers on hand.