April 2014 Summaries

The Postmark website and Bounces API endpoint experienced a partial outage on April 24, 2014, from approximately 1:00 PM to 5:30 PM EST. The issue was initially caused by the deletion of view shards in CouchDB views during ongoing maintenance, resulting in a rebuild time of over 24 hours. To work around this problem, hotfixes were implemented using different data sources, resolving the issues around 5:30 PM. Although some performance degradation is expected for certain application features until the views are rebuilt, deleting servers from the website or API is now fully functional, and enhancements to alternate data sources will be made to improve recovery times in case of future CouchDB view degradation.

The Postmark API provides an easy way to retrieve bounced email addresses. The API can be accessed through the `RestClient` gem in Ruby, which allows developers to execute HTTP GET requests and parse JSON responses. By setting the correct parameters and headers, including the `X-Postmark-Server-Token`, users can obtain a list of bounced emails with various fields such as email address, bounce type, and inactive status. The response can be easily parsed into a usable data format using Ruby's standard library. Additionally, Postmark provides an official Ruby gem that offers a more convenient interface for accessing bounce information. By leveraging the Bounces API, developers can create their own reporting and analytics tools to improve email deliverability.

We've been spending the last two days auditing and responding to the OpenSSL vulnerability known as Heartbleed, which affects around 70% of the Internet. This widespread bug can cause disclosure of sensitive data, including private keys and passwords. As a precaution, we applied security updates as they became available, cleared all logged in sessions for accounts and users, rekeyed and reissued our SSL certificates, and recommended resetting passwords and API keys to prevent potential unauthorized access.