June 2016 Summaries

The Postmark team has recently experienced several service outages due to major DDOS attacks, transit provider issues with Telia, and hardware failures, resulting in connectivity issues, delays, and missing activity. The most recent outage occurred on June 20th, causing delays of up to 5 minutes for Inbound processing and Outbound sending, as well as missing activity and stats records. To address these issues, the team is working on code changes, separating Inbound processing from Elasticsearch, and making RabbitMQ more resilient to increased load. They are also taking steps to isolate paths to services to reduce impact and add DDOS protection. The Postmark team apologizes for the inconvenience and promises to correct these issues to provide an even more reliable service.

The quest to curtail email littering is a pressing issue in the world of product development, where every message sent must add value to an experience. To reduce email litter, developers should question every email they send by asking themselves if the recipient expects it and would thank them for sending it. Giving customers control over their notifications can also help minimize clutter, with options ranging from simple checkboxes to more nuanced contextual information. Being judicious with opt-in requests is crucial, as users may not find certain emails valuable or relevant to their workflow. Finally, batching send notifications when possible and considering the context in which they are sent can further improve email engagement and sending reputation. By implementing these strategies, developers can make a significant impact on reducing email litter and improving customer experience.

The Postmark team has released several updates and improvements to their product, including a new API Explorer that allows users to test the Postmark API without running cURL commands. The team has also worked on performance and scaling improvements, adding more instrumentation to monitor performance issues and making changes to improve the performance of their RabbitMQ cluster. Additionally, they have released a new status page with improved incident types and reporting, as well as addressing several bug fixes, including errors in the Spamcheck API and transient events showing as delivered in the API. The team is also planning to release several new features, including domain verification, permissions, link tracking, and 2-Factor Authentication, which were requested by customers and are expected to be released in the second half of the year.