September 2015 Summaries

The Postmark email service experienced significant issues with API response times and email delivery over the past few days, primarily due to increased load on its MySQL database servers caused by disk IO saturation. An emergency maintenance was performed to bring the system down to failover to a second server, resulting in improved performance and response times. The company has identified areas for improvement, focusing on capacity planning and failure handling to prevent similar issues in the future.

You can easily add a sender image to transactional emails for recipients of your email who use Gmail or independent email clients like Thunderbird. To do this, you can upload an image from your computer and set it as the profile picture in your Google Apps or Gmail account, or create a Gravatar account and associate it with your email address. This makes your emails more personal and friendly, increasing their value and encouraging users to open and act on them.

When Postmark launched its Templates feature, it released three application emails that can be used by developers. The company recently shared a new guide on modern receipt and invoice email best practices. A key aspect of sending good receipt emails is to use clear subject lines and from names, put important information related to purchases at the top of the email, tell customers how their purchase will appear on their billing statements, encourage them to reach out to customer support if they have questions or issues, consider telling them how the money they pay is spent, and avoid using [email protected] email addresses. Research was conducted on receipt emails from companies like Buffer, Apple's App Store, Ghost, BoltBus, and Uber, as well as AWeber. The results showed that clear subject lines and from names were common among successful receipt emails, but some companies were missing important information related to purchases or encouraging customers to reach out for support. Adii Pienaar, Founder and CEO of Receiptful, emphasized the importance of being functional and clear in receipt emails, suggesting a descriptive subject line with company name, amount, and possibly date is valuable to customers.

The Postmark team has released an open-source welcome email template that incorporates best practices learned from analyzing successful welcome emails from companies such as Airbnb, Quip, Zapier, Trello, and Gumroad. The template is designed to be simple yet effective, with a clear subject line and From name, greeting the user by name, including a brief description of the product, providing links to resources that help users learn how to use the product, and encouraging them to reach out to customer support if needed. The template also informs users about free trials and educational drip email campaigns, while avoiding no-reply emails and reminding users when their trial period ends. By following these guidelines and using this template, developers can create a well-designed welcome email that sets a positive tone for new users.

We're excited about Mustachio, a templating language developed by the Postmark team to enhance their Templating experience. The goal was to create an approachable and natural experience for developers and designers, with an editing environment that minimizes context switches between template editing and external code editors. To achieve this, we extended the Mustache language to add features such as Model Inference, which detects dynamic content in templates and provides a reference model, and Complex Keys, which allows for more concise markup and traversal of data models. We deliberately chose not to include features like partials or helpers in our initial release, instead opting for a focused approach that ensures the added complexity is manageable and defect-free. By building Mustachio from scratch, we can leverage the team's skill sets, reduce operational complexity, and increase code sharing among team members. The final result is a great templating language solution that enhances the Postmark Template experience.