The three messaging modes Hogsend gives you — transactional, lifecycle, and marketing — plus the two data primitives that drive them. Real, copy-pasteable how-tos.

Hogsend sends mail in three modes — transactional, lifecycle, and marketing — and each one is a first-class primitive you reach for directly in code. The logic lives in your repo as TypeScript, not behind a builder UI. These recipes are real, copy-pasteable how-tos: the exact Hogsend call for each job, plus the data primitives that feed all three.

The three messaging modes

Mode	What it is	Hogsend primitive
Transactional	One-off, system-triggered mail to a single person — verify your email, reset your password, a receipt	`hs.emails.send()` → `POST /v1/emails`
Lifecycle	Multi-step, behaviour-driven sequences — onboarding, trial nudges, win-back	`defineJourney()` — durable TypeScript
Marketing	A one-time broadcast of one template to an audience	`hs.campaigns.send()` → `POST /v1/campaigns`

Underneath all three, two more primitives carry the data that drives everything:

hs.contacts.upsert() — the durable contact record: who someone is.
hs.events.send() — the behaviour stream that triggers journeys: what they just did.

Which primitive do I reach for?

Sending one email to one person because the system did something?
  → hs.emails.send()           (transactional)        recipes/transactional-emails

Reacting to behaviour over time, with delays and branches?
  → defineJourney()            (lifecycle)            recipes/lifecycle-journeys

Blasting one template to a whole audience, once?
  → hs.campaigns.send()        (marketing)            recipes/marketing-campaigns

Recording who someone is, or what they just did?
  → hs.contacts.upsert() / hs.events.send()           recipes/events-and-contacts

How the pieces fit

A single signup touches every primitive: you upsert a contact (who they are), events.send a user.signed_up event (what they did, which triggers the onboarding journey), and emails.send a transactional verify-email. From there the journey takes over, buckets re-segment as contact properties change, and you can broadcast a campaign to anyone subscribed to a list.

// 1. who they are
await hs.contacts.upsert({ email, userId, properties: { plan: "free" } });

// 2. what they did — triggers the onboarding journey
await hs.events.send({ name: "user.signed_up", userId, eventProperties: { source: "web" } });

// 3. a one-off transactional email
await hs.emails.send({ to: email, template: "transactional/verify-email", props: { verifyUrl } });

What you get across all three modes

Three guarantees that hold for every send Hogsend makes, and that show up throughout these recipes:

Typed templates. template and props are type-checked against your own React Email registry — a renamed or missing prop is a build failure, not a broken email in production.
Automatic tracking. Every send — including one-off transactional — flows through the same tracked mailer, so opens and clicks are recorded and loop back into the engine as events that can trigger journeys or move bucket membership.
The property split. contactProperties (who they are) and eventProperties (what happened) are separate bags — see Events & contacts.

Recipes

The three messaging modes

Which primitive do I reach for?

How the pieces fit

What you get across all three modes

The recipes

Transactional emails

Lifecycle journeys

Marketing campaigns

Events & contacts

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