Postmark

If you are looking to start hosting your own Mastodon server (or already started hosting one!) then you may have come across the need for an email provider or SMTP server. In fact, Mastodon’s getting started documentation lists an email provider as a required service that you should have in place before beginning the process of running your own Mastodon server. Many “one-click” Mastodon installers such as Digital Ocean’s will even prompt you for SMTP server credentials during the setup process. Why use an email service provider with Mastodon? Email plays a crucial role when running a Mastodon instance. For example, users will receive their signup confirmations or password reset links via email—and you need an SMTP server, because if those messages don’t make it to the inbox, your users will be stuck! We don’t want that to happen. And folks will want to know about new followers, too! You’ll

About once a year, the Postmark team runs what we call “experimentation weeks”. Experimentation weeks are our twist on internal hackathons or hack weeks, which are usually limited to engineering and/or product. Experimentation weeks are open to everyone on the Postmark team: the more cross-functional, the better. It’s an invitation to spend time away from day-to-day project work, trying out new things, exploring new technologies, or scratching a creative itch. This year there was one requirement: Every project needed to serve our support team. Great support is a core feature for Postmark Too many companies view their support teams as a cost center that handles issues and complaints, or as an expensive add-on to drive revenue. We feel the opposite: We know that great support is a core part of what makes Postmark valuable—and it’s a major reason why people love Postmark so much. And because our team of email

ActiveCampaign Quarterly Hackathon Each quarter at ActiveCampaign the Tech and Product teams host a company-wide hackathon. It is an opportunity for everyone to take a small time to focus on a project, pet-peeve, or proof of concept they have been thinking about. As this is a highly collaborative event, non-engineers are encouraged to participate as well. The event takes place over three days, the first two being “hack days” with presentations on the final day. Several hackathon projects have even made it to production! For this quarter’s hackathon the unofficial theme was AI. Although it was not required, “bonus points” were awarded for incorporating AI into projects developed for this hackathon. This theme led to several creative project ideas including a data science playground, a proof of concept for a self-hosted AI chat-bot, improved asynchronous automation, improved code searching, and many more. The ActiveCampaign developer relations team also participated in the hackathon

This piece was first emailed to 64k Postmark subscribers on Jun 7, 2023. Want to join them? You’re only a couple of clicks away 💌 Hi friend, Welcome to another issue of Postmark’s monthly newsletter, “Happy Sending,” in which we bring you industry news, useful tools, and tips for sending great emails—plus the occasional update about our product and what it can do for you. This month you’ll hear about data quality, marketing automation, and some recent product updates in Postmark. And if you are a cat person, you will have opinions about an odd authentication trend we’ve noticed… 🐈 Hey, Rob 👋 Industry news and useful tools Today’s section is curated by Rob Kaczanowski, Growth Marketing Lead at Postmark, who calls himself “a dad to two large dogs, aspiring sailor, constant redecorator, rooftop gardener, and whatever you call a person who loves board games.” Here is what Rob recommends

Messages API intro and overview The Messages API is a REST API that allows you to get details about any outbound or inbound messages that were processed through your Postmark server. The Messages API also supports search functionality through the use of query parameters. However, each search can only return up to 10,000 messages. If you need to retrieve message details for more than 10,000 messages, you will need to use search parameters to narrow down the results. This tutorial gives you two examples for breaking down larger sets of messages into chunks of less than 10,000 using node.js. The results will be exported as a CSV file that can be used for further searching and auditing. After completing this tutorial, you can use the provided code to write your own script to export outbound or inbound email message data from Postmark using the Messages API. Important consideration: The Messages

Postmark stores message content and activity data for 45 days by default—that’s much longer than the competition. If 45 days is too short (or too long), with our new retention add-on you have the flexibility to adjust retention from 7-365 days. If you ever wondered if there’s a way to adjust how long Postmark stores messages and activity insights, you’re not alone. We diligently keep track of customer requests—and providing a way to customize your retention settings is one of the most popular ones. So we’re excited to share that starting today, you get to decide how long Postmark stores your data. We’ll continue to store messages and activity logs for 45 days by default (just like we do today), but with our Retention Add-on, you can pick a retention time that works best for you. Increase your data retention to up to a year and keep crucial data for

Using Amazon for email is like going to a car dealership and buying a car for 200 bucks. No other provider can match that kind of price—but there’s a catch: they give you all the individual parts, and you’ve got to put the car together yourself.  So if you don’t have a whole team to dedicate to it, are dealing with limited resources, or need to move fast, you might need to look at alternative car dealerships. And the same is true for email delivery services 😉  Here is a list of alternative providers to Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)… compiled by us, an Amazon SES alternative provider! Postmark is the only email delivery service we know inside out, so it’s also the only one we can wholeheartedly endorse. But we also know from talking to thousands of customers over the last 13 years that we are not for everybody, so we recommend that you carefully check

This piece was first emailed to 60k Postmark subscribers on Apr 26, 2023. Want to join them? You’re only a couple of clicks away 💌 Hi friend, Welcome to another issue of Postmark’s monthly newsletter, “Happy Sending,” in which we bring you industry news, useful tools, and tips for sending great emails—plus the occasional update about our product and what it can do for you. This month you’ll hear from folks who operate a top-level domain, run productivity experiments while avoiding team burnout, and make API calls within VS Code. You’ll also get some serious authentication education with a brand new 3-part video series that a reviewer described as “it’s like David Attenborough, Sigur Rós, and the email geeks had a baby” 🤯 Hey, Brad 👋 Industry news and useful tools This section is curated by Brad Becker, the Developer Relations Manager at ActiveCampaign, who describes himself as “a tech tinkerer, coffee

This piece was first emailed to 56k Postmark subscribers on Mar 29, 2023. Want to join them? You’re only a couple of clicks away 💌 Hi friend, Welcome to another issue of Postmark’s monthly newsletter, “Happy Sending,” in which we bring you industry news, useful tools, and tips for sending great emails—plus the occasional update about our product and what it can do for you. This month we ponder important questions like: should you still use plain-text emails?, will customer service be replaced by robots?, and did we just stumble upon the greatest product review of all time? (For the record, the answers are: of course, probably not, oh yes 100%.) Hey, Abdu 👋 Industry news and useful tools Today’s section is curated by our Senior Customer Success Specialist Abdullah Al-hennawy, who describes himself as a “customer helper, father of 2 beauties, lover of long walks, and recently a gym

From its very beginning in 2009 and for the entire first decade of its existence, Postmark was well-known for being laser-focused on transactional email only. Then sometime in 2020 we built a fully separate infrastructure that allows Postmark customers to also send bulk emails like product announcements, newsletters, and updates to terms-of-service……but some people (maybe including you? 😉) still don’t know we can do both!So if you came here wondering “Can I send bulk/marketing email with Postmark?,” the answer is: yes, you can! You can send all your customer communications with Postmark, and this is how you do it.  Sending promotional and marketing emails with Postmark  Postmark’s unique infrastructure routes different types of email—transactional, broadcast, and everything in between—through separate Message Streams so they all maintain optimal deliverability.  Each Message Stream you create is classified based on how your email is sent: transactional (sent to a single recipient) or broadcast (sent to multiple recipients). That classification helps us group and route emails into the right sending