March 2012 Summaries

The Postmark team experienced a series of outages caused by a failure in their MongoDB cluster, leading to delayed emails, disabled activity, and a down Bounce API. The issue was exacerbated by the high volume of data captured daily, which required constant purging and compaction to maintain performance. However, this process put additional load on the servers, causing inconsistencies in email sending services and activity statuses. On the positive side, the outages led to an improved Bounce API with near-instant responses, thanks to a rebuild that now uses Elastic Search directly. The team is reevaluating their architecture, planning thorough benchmarking of other databases to ensure seamless real-time sending without compromising the email archive.

The application experienced a maintenance process on Saturday morning that was expected to be low-impact but ultimately resulted in significant outages and delays, with email sending being slowed down. The team realized that the transfer of data from the old database to the new one was incomplete, causing inconsistent data in test accounts and delayed sending. To fix the issue, the application was put in emergency offline mode and the old database dump was reimported, but some records were still missing. A decision was made to revert back to the previous state, which resulted in lost data between 10am EST and 2:30pm EST, including new account sign-ups and credit deductions. The team is now investigating what went wrong and plans to migrate again next weekend, with a plan to notify customers of any upcoming downtime.

You know that sending your transactional email through Postmark is the best way to improve your delivery rates, but sometimes even with the best tools and intentions, emails can end up in spam. To troubleshoot why an email is going to a spam filter in Gmail, you can click on the email itself and look below the sender and recipient information for more information about why Google thinks that email is spam. This includes examples of known spam patterns, such as messages from specific domains or content used in spam messages. It's also a good idea to periodically receive copies of your transactional emails and monitor changes to detect any issues. If you're ever stumped, Postmark's expert support team is available to help diagnose the problem.

We encourage our customers to think of Postmark as a "good senders club" for transactional email, helping them keep bounce rates low and deliverability high. To catch email typos without slowing down the signup process, we recommend using client-side suggestions or Postmark's Bounce Hooks API, which provides valuable information about bounced emails via webhooks, enabling proactive fixes and reducing customer support queries.