August 2010 Summaries

Making your email searchable by including relevant keywords in the subject line or body can help recipients find emails more easily, especially for online sales and confirmations. This practice is particularly useful when sending transactional emails that may need to be referenced later, such as flight confirmations or account information. Including clear labels like sender name or product names can also improve searchability, making it easier for recipients to locate specific emails in their inbox. By optimizing email content with relevant keywords and labels, businesses can enhance the user experience and reduce the likelihood of emails being lost or forgotten.

The company has finally implemented attachments in their JSON-based REST API, which was previously lacking this feature. The developers used base64-encoded strings to make the data more resilient to encoding problems. The API is fully backwards compatible and allows users to send one or more attachments with a maximum size of 10MB. However, sending large files or viruses is not allowed and requires special permission. The company plans to update their client libraries in the near future, including the Ruby library. It is recommended that apps send email with attachments from a background job to avoid issues with message size and submission time.

We've had a few support requests asking about testing email in our development environment. A test environment is crucial to avoid sending email to real users by mistake and to inspect outbound messages for proper display and headers. Two solutions exist: testing with the API using a "POSTMARK_API_TEST" key, which ensures valid requests but doesn't allow message inspection, or using SMTP with MockSMTP, an open-source app that creates a local server for point-to-point email testing, allowing message content inspection without sending live emails.

Starting at 1am EST tomorrow (August 4th), the Postmark web app will be down while they migrate their Linode instances to a closer data center to improve latency. The API and SMTP servers will remain unaffected. This migration is part of their efforts to optimize their architecture, hosting the core sending engine in a dedicated Rackspace environment and moving Linode instances to Atlanta for reduced latency. Postmark plans to open up more of their API in the future, allowing users to create servers or add sender signatures, but this update will not impact the current functionality.