June 2011 Summaries

Gmail has made a change to help identify spoofed emails and verify sender identities in inboxes. The "via" label, added to the 'From' address field for third-party senders like Postmark, provides information about the return-path domain used by these senders. To prevent this label from displaying, users can sign their messages with DKIM, a process made easy by Postmark's tools and support. For customers sending emails on behalf of others, a simple HTML page explains the purpose of the "via" label, aiming to reduce confusion for recipients.

We've added several new API wrappers for popular languages and frameworks, bringing the total number of supported languages to over 30. These wrappers were contributed by members of our developer community and can be found in our developer documentation. Our community is growing, with a new email list being launched, where developers can learn, contribute, and participate in shaping Postmark's availability for more developers worldwide. We're also building a wishlist of plugins and integrations that we'd like to see in the future, inviting anyone who has an idea or would like to contribute to join our community.

Port25's testing service offers a tool to test email authentication, including SPF, DKIM, and Sender-ID. The tool allows users to send a test email to a special email address that will return a report on their authentication results and SpamAssassin score. The report provides detailed information about the tests, including the results of each check and any errors or warnings. This can be helpful for users who need to troubleshoot issues with their email authentication setup. Port25's testing service is highly regarded by the developer, who has used it for years and praises its support and features.

Postmark, an email sending service, experienced delays in sending emails last week due to issues with their primary data store, MongoDB. The company had previously tried using CouchDB but found it to be less performant than MongoDB and eventually reverted back. To resolve the issue, Postmark is working with 10gen, the developers of MongoDB, and upgrading its infrastructure at Rackspace to improve performance. They are also migrating their replica sets to better hardware to reduce slower I/O from EC2. The delays were caused by high load on MongoDB leading to iowait on the servers, which slowed down queries and ultimately delayed sending emails. Postmark is taking steps to optimize and upgrade MongoDB to prevent such issues in the future.