Postmark product update: September 2016

It’s been a couple of months since our last product update, so it’s time to let you know what we’ve been working on! Our focus the last two months has been on improving the performance and stability of Postmark, as well as laying the groundwork for some of the big features still to come this year. In this post I’ll provide an overview of the bigger changes, and also let you know what you can look forward to over the next few weeks.

Released: July/August #

Performance improvements

Our goal at Postmark is to deliver all emails to the inbox in 10 seconds or less. To maintain this goal as our volume increases, we’re committed to constantly work on the stability and reliability of our systems. We’re working on some blog posts with deeper technical details about those improvements, but I’ll briefly mention the biggest changes we’ve made over the past two months:

• We increased Elasticsearch capacity, and made improvements to our existing servers, to ensure we can handle more spikes in email traffic.
• We upgraded our RabbitMQ cluster to v3, which resulted in a significant improvement in our ability to process messages as fast as possible.
• We moved our SMTP (smtp.postmarkapp.com) services to three Packet.net data centers, giving a nice performance boost from bare metal hardware and faster load balancers. 

New Guides

We published two new Guides recently to help improve how you send email. First, we published a monster guide called Transactional Email Best Practices to help you craft the best possible transactional emails for your customers. We also published a guide on how to use Gmail Inbox Actions to improve your transactional emails even further. If there are any additional guides you’d like to see on the topic of transactional email, let me know! 

New home page

We have a new landing page! Our product has evolved a lot over the past year or so, and our marketing site was no longer accurately reflecting what makes Postmark such a great choice for your transactional email. So this new site focuses on our biggest strengths: fast and reliable delivery, robust and easy to use APIs and features, and amazing customer support. This is the part where I ask you to tell your friends about us :)

Bug fixes

We know sometimes even a small bug can be a big issue for your business. So in July and August we fixed a total of 18 bugs, all related to design tweaks and small irregularities in SMTP and API sending. We have a team meeting every week where we discuss the most important bugs to focus on, so this is a continuing focus for us. So if you find any bugs along the way, please send them along to us. Bug fixing will always be part of what we do, and we need your help to make sure we don’t miss anything.

Coming up #

In terms of what we have in store, it’s going to be a busy few months until the end of the year. The two biggest features we have coming soon are link tracking and domain verification — the ability to verify entire domains for sending, as opposed to verifying individual Sender Signatures every time you want to send from a new email address. We’re in the final QA stages of this feature, so we should be launching it very soon.

As always, if you’d like to suggest a feature, draw attention to an issue you’re having, or just want to talk about how Postmark fits into your email world, we’d love to hear from you. 

Happy sending!
Rian
Product Manager, Postmark