Postmark
If you’re anything like most senders, you encountered SMTP services for the first time while figuring out how to integrate email sending into another tool. Sending email at scale—and doing it fast and reliably—actually isn’t all that easy. That’s why most platforms, including content management platforms (like WordPress or Craft) or ecommerce solutions, often don’t handle email sending themselves. Instead, they ask you to hook up an SMTP email service to take care of the sending. Many popular software solutions even have built-in SMTP plugins to make it easy for you to connect your SMTP provider. So, your next step is to compare the different SMTP relay service providers and choose the best one for your sending needs. But where do you start? What makes an excellent SMTP partner? In this guide, we’ll break down the key qualities you should look for in a provider and compare the pros, cons,…
What if we told you that your company’s email deliverability doesn’t depend on you being an all-knowing email expert? SMTP relay services allow businesses to send bulk emails seamlessly, protect their sender reputations, and avoid being blocklisted—all with the dedicated support of an SMTP service provider. Here’s what you need to know. What is an SMTP relay? An SMTP relay is a service that allows the transmission of email messages from one server to another. An easy way to understand what an SMTP relay service does is to imagine an Olympic relay race: your email message (a transactional email or promotional/marketing email) is the baton, and the runners are SMTP servers who pass the baton to one another until the final line. If you don’t want to use an SMTP relay provider to manage your email sending, you can use your own email server—in which case, you’re responsible for setting…
Last year, Postmark celebrated its tenth anniversary. In 2010, Postmark was built using the best tools and methodologies available, but over the years, it had accumulated many responsibilities that weren’t anticipated when launched. Additionally, as many readers will remember, the landscape and methods for building software substantially evolved over those 10 years: Async web frameworks were in their infancy.Docker didn’t exist.jQuery was the de facto way to build interactive web apps.12 Factor App hadn’t been presented.“Infrastructure as code” didn’t exist.“Serverless” hadn’t been coined. Today, I’d like to share some details about one of the largest projects our team has ever embarked on—moving from our colocated data center to AWS—with some of the lessons we learned on this journey and tools we used to be successful. Part I: The journey begins Make the next right decision As with most early-stage apps, you have to make trade-offs to validate the product quickly,…
If you want to protect your deliverability, it’s important to separate your transactional and promotional email. With Postmark’s Message Streams, we help you make sure that the different types of email never ever mix: Transactional Message Streams are for your invoices, password reset emails, or similar and Broadcast Message Streams handle your newsletters, promotions, or other marketing email. For us to process your mail fast and reliably, you have to let us know whether your email is a transactional or broadcast message. But when sending via SMTP, we learned that some of you were running into issues. Specifying Message Streams when sending via SMTP When sending mail with Postmark via SMTP, there used to be only one option for you to specify a Message Stream: You’d authenticate with a Server Token and specify the Message Stream you’d like to use with the `X-PM-Message-Stream` header (that’s the Message Stream header). If…
We’ve noticed a trend where some customers see sudden ISP Blocks and soft bounces from Google only for specific email messages. As we do for any reports of an issue like this, we investigated the messages to help spot a root cause. 🕵️♀️️ Gmail’s bounce messages hint at issues with the content and links While Gmail doesn’t share all its secrets around why they might decide to deliver or block a message, their bounce notifications can provide helpful hints to help you track down the issue. In this case, looking at the event details for a message that couldn’t get delivered shows a ISP block with a bounce code that says “Our system has detected that this message is suspicious due to the nature of the content and/or the links within.” Investigating issues in Postmark: If your email was blocked, we show you the bounce code we’ve received from the…