Tracking sent emails and content

Today we released a really big update to Postmark. It’s been a popular feature request and something we’ve wanted ourselves. While you’ve always been able to track delivery problems, you can now track a complete history of sent emails as well. This will greatly improve both record keeping and troubleshooting when it comes to delivering your email. Here’s how it works:

Activity Page #

You will notice that the previously named “Delivery Issues” page is now labeled “Activity”. We’ve kept the same basic format as before, except now in addition to bounces and spam complaints, you can see a stream of sent emails. Here is what it looks like:

As you can see, you can now view each email sent along with the subject of the message. Using our search tool, it is simple to search for an email address or subject line to see only the activity for those messages. You can also filter by tag, status, or bounce type. Keep in mind, it is possible for an email to be sent, then bounce later or have someone mark it as spam. We’ll show this activity for the email address so you can view the complete history.

At the moment, we are storing the last 30 days of emails. For an individual account this might not seem like a lot, but considering we send many millions of emails each month, it adds up fast. We’re using the awesome MongoDB (with replication and failover) to handle the job.

Note: The sent email records will start today, but will not show previously sent emails before the deployment.

Message Status #

In addition to the activity of an email address, it is also useful to know the status or content of a specific message. For instance, let’s say an email was sent from your application to a customer. Now you can search for the subject or email address in the activity page to find it. Once you locate the message, you can view the actual message content and the specific history of that message. We even designed a view to toggle between the HTML, Text, and Raw message content.

Here is what it looks like:

In Queue Status #

You may (or may not) notice a new status type. We’ve added the status In Queue to specify if the message is currently waiting to be sent by Postmark. Right now, this just means that we’re waiting to send it to the mail server, but very soon we will even open this up so you can see the status on the mail server as well. If volume spikes on our side or an ISP decides to limit connections, you will be able to see the status.

Our goal is to continue opening up functionality that you would normally expect in a mail server, then go beyond that with a rich set of reporting features and an elegant interface. I hope you enjoy the new addition. Please let us know what you think!