September 2017 Summaries

Transactional vs. marketing emails differ in trigger and scope, with transactional emails triggered by individual customer actions and marketing emails sent to lists of contacts without a specific event. Transactional emails typically have higher engagement rates, faster delivery speeds, and are less susceptible to human error, while marketing emails often require recipient permission and can be more prone to errors. Separating these email types is crucial for better deliverability, reduced support requests, and improved brand trust. This separation can be achieved by using different IP addresses, subdomains, or even just sending from different email addresses, and tools like Message Streams can help streamline the process. By separating marketing and transactional emails, businesses can optimize each type of email without interference and improve their overall email strategy.

The need for web app health monitoring has become increasingly important as web applications have become more complex over the years. To address this, companies are using various tools like New Relic, Pingdom, and Nagios to monitor their web application's performance. However, these tools often provide specific details that are not ideal for customers or developers who need high-level information about the application's health. This is where automated user experience monitoring comes in, which involves measuring everything and providing quantitative measures of the experience for users. By combining development and QA teams' efforts, companies can collect information from both sides and analyze it to provide a complete picture that's usable by the whole team. Automated tests written by testers are used to monitor the end-user experience, while tools managed by developers and systems teams provide back-end information. The challenging part of monitoring is coverage and run frequency, but with over 1500 automated tests running daily, Postmark has found a balance between these aspects.

The Postmark app has redesigned its Activity page to improve user experience, making it easier and faster for users to find emails. The new layout features a table structure with each message event on the left, allowing for easy scanning of the page. Additional features include an "Delivered" event, updated labeling of "Sent" status as "Processed", information-rich tool tips, and the ability to export search results to CSV directly from the UI, up to 500 records. The redesign aims to provide clarity and speed in finding emails, addressing previous issues with data comprehension and filtering capabilities.

The Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) is a standard created in 2016 to improve how DKIM and SPF results are passed from one mail server to the next during forwarding. When messages are forwarded through intermediaries like mailing lists or email account forwarding, DKIM and SPF can break, causing authentication failures. ARC aims to fix this by preserving email authentication results across subsequent intermediaries ("hops") that may modify the message. This allows receivers to trust the authentication results and deliver legitimate messages from indirect mailflows. While ARC is implemented by email receivers and ISPs, customers like Postmark can use it to improve DMARC reports with less failures resulting from forwarding. The standard includes headers such as ARC-Authentication-Results, ARC-Seal, and ARC-Message-Signature that allow the ARC chain to be validated during each hop.

Bounce handling is crucial in email marketing as it helps prevent lost messages from costing revenue. Applications can improve this by implementing proactive interface decisions, such as displaying clear explanations for bounced messages and notifying customers about the issue. Examples of effective bounce handling include displaying bounce notifications immediately in apps like Netflix, providing detailed information on account-level bounce status, and using ESPs' bounce data to inform customer workflows. By taking these steps, applications can reduce customer frustration and improve their overall experience.