Email delivery
Recently, Val Sopi from blogstatic contacted our Support team to ask whether he’d be able to turn his blog posts into newsletters and send them out through Postmark, bypassing that famous marketing platform that is as yellow as ours (✉️ 🦍). Our answer was yes: he could do that by dynamically adding content to existing Postmark Templates—which is something anyone can do if they’re using our service to send email. Once Val messaged back to tell us he’d been successful, we invited him to join us on Zoom and demo his process so we could write this tutorial for you. Val from blogstatic demoing for the Postmark team. We had fun! Step 0, prerequisite: set up Postmark To send newsletters (or any other type of email) via Postmark, the prerequisite step is… to set up Postmark. We’ll assume most of you reading this page have already done it—but if that’s not the case
One of the questions we hear most often at Postmark is: what is transactional email, and how is it different from other types of email? Well, friends, seeing as we’ve been dealing with transactional email since 2009, we’re happy to answer that question in lots of detail and with plenty of examples. What is transactional email? A definition Transactional emails are messages that are sent in response to an action a user takes on a website or application. They contain data or content that is specific to that user, and are typically sent to individuals one at a time. Examples include: Password reset emailsAccount creation emailsWelcome emailsShipping confirmationsPayment invoicesPurchase receiptsOrder confirmation emailsPayment failure notifications In general, recipients expect to receive transactional emails; and in many cases, they will actively refresh their inbox until the message arrives. Transactional vs. marketing email Transactional emails contain user-specific content and are typically sent to individuals
When you sign up for a Postmark account, we ask you to use a work email. If you try to sign up with an address from a public domain like Gmail or Yahoo, you are met with this error message: Sorry, we don’t allow email addresses on public domains such as Gmail and Yahoo. Please use your work email on a private domain. The first step in our registration process And if you reach out to our support team, you might hear that using free providers like Gmail or Yahoo can be viewed as spoofing, and that you need to sign up with a domain you control since the domain will be used as your sender signature. This blog post is dedicated to you, JB! We know this can be a point of confusion, or even frustration, especially since other providers don’t ask for the same thing. But a big
You’ve got a list of all the sources you’re sending from, and you’ve made sure they are all set up with DKIM and SPF. So why aren’t you seeing 100% alignment when your DMARC report comes through? Here is how you might first spot the problem. In this screenshot from DMARC Digests, the ‘Health’ section gives you a quick overview of how each sending source has been categorised: a green tick is a known source, a green arrow pointing towards the right is a forward, and a red x is unknown. As a sender, you can be pretty sure you set everything up correctly, but then your report shows that SPF didn’t pass and the Return-Path header domain doesn’t match the From domain. The likely culprit here is forwarding. …are you ready to go down this rabbit hole with us? How forwarding affects DKIM and SPF Emails are forwarded all the time, and when
There are three questions you can ask any email service provider to establish whether you’re going to have delivery issues: Do they take good care of their shared IPs? Do they use separate IPs for transactional and marketing email? Will their team proactively help you? With most providers, the answers will be no, no, and no—which means you will, in fact, run into a delivery issue sooner or later. 1. A lot of providers don’t take good care of their shared IPs (and try to upsell you dedicated ones) Most providers have reputation-based IP pools for different customers; you can imagine them as tiers going from ‘great’ to ‘average’ all the way down to ‘really bad’. Providers often start a customer on their best IP pool but downrank them as soon as something happens (for example, a spam event). This makes deliverability rates go down; and as the customer’s deliverability worsens, their ability
We’ve been running Postmark for more than ten years, and protecting our customers and IP reputations from spammers has always been one of our missions. Many have commented that our spam threshold at Postmark is low compared to other providers. We allow up to 10 complaints for every 10,000 sent emails, or 0.10%. That’s right, 1/10th of a percent. Why is it so low? Because we strongly believe that true, honest emailing should generate ~0 spam complaints. Before you dismiss the boldness of our statement and shout, “That’s unattainable!”, let us explain our stance. Your transactional emails should never go to spam A transactional email is a system-generated email in response to some action: a sign-up, a comment notification, an invoice, etc. Because the message is tied to a user action, transactional emails should be delivered with 100% expectation from the user about to receive them, and further, provide action or value
If you’re using Apple’s desktop or mobile email clients, you can expect your inbox to become more colorful soon: support for BIMI, the email specification that allows brands to display their logo next to email messages in the inbox, is coming to Apple Mail on iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS Ventura. Apple is the latest inbox provider to add BIMI support, a move that will likely encourage more brands to implement BIMI as well. Here’s what you should know about this update. A quick recap: What is BIMI? BIMI, short for Brand Indicators for Message Identification, is an email specification that rewards brands who properly authenticate their emails with the option to display brand logos in the customer’s inbox. The BIMI before-and-after: no logo (left), brand logo (right) BIMI builds on top of DMARC, a powerful authentication standard that prevents spammers from using your domain to send email without your
Transactional emails are crucial when you want your business to run smoothly and your customers to be happy. Here at Postmark we help thousands of people send out their transactional emails every day, but we also send out a lot of our own—in the last seven days alone, we sent out 67,966. That’s a lot of transactional emails! …do you want to see what they look like? 😉 Keep reading and check out the main emails we use to run and grow our business. We hope they will spark ideas for how you can run and grow yours, too. 8 transactional email examples Transactional email is a type of one-to-one, automated email a business sends to an individual user after a specific trigger or event such as a new sign-up, a password reset request, or an online purchase (unlike bulk or marketing emails, where the same message is distributed to an entire email
If you’re looking for an API to integrate email functionality into your app or product, you’ve got a bunch of email API providers to choose from. But which ones are worth looking into? We’ve written in detail about the factors you should consider when evaluating email APIs, so here we’ll be looking at how the most popular email API vendors compare to help narrow down your search. Need a quick email API refresher? What’s an email API—and when should you use an API vs. SMTP? For an introduction to email APIs and popular use cases, check out our 101 of email APIs. Comparison sheet: The best email APIs in 2022 side by side For those of you who just need a quick comparison of the best and most popular email API services and their pricing side by side, we’ve put together this handy spreadsheet. Feel free to make a copy,…
When building a digital product, chances are that at some point, you’ll need to integrate email functionality. Maybe you’d like to set up a password reset email flow, use an email-based login process for your app, send receipts or other transactional emails, or automate onboarding or newsletter sending. Or maybe you’re looking for a way to let your customers send emails from your app. No matter what your email use case is, there’s one problem: Getting emails delivered is harder than you might think. Setting up and maintaining an email infrastructure that processes emails fast and reliably takes time, skill, and effort. Most developers can’t (or don’t want to) handle it themselves and opt to use a dedicated email delivery service instead. Email APIs are making it easy to connect to these delivery services so that you can easily integrate email functionality into your app or product. What is an…