Welcome to the March Newsletter!
This month we share some important Postmark updates with you, and we’re also really excited to introduce Wildbit’s latest product, Conveyor!
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📰 Industry news and useful tools
By now you’ve probably seen this triumphant post by Google about their recent spam filter changes. But as Laura Atkins pointed out in her post Gmail, machine learning, filters, it’s not as straightforward as it sounds:
My recent call volume about going to spam at Gmail told me that Gmail had implemented some new filters. Many people were telling me that things were fine and then, with no change in what they were doing, mail started going to bulk. Other delivery folks were also talking about their customers getting caught up in filters.
We also saw an increased number of reports about legitimate messages going to Gmail’s spam folder, and Anna wrote about it on our blog, where she discusses why this issue is more prevalent with transactional email:
First, Postmark is unique in that we have a pretty strict transactional-only message policy. We even have actual humans vetting each new account to ensure our sending reputation is top-notch. That means we're not used to seeing Gmail issues, so just a handful of these cases makes a pretty big blip on our radar. Second, Google is specifically targeting spoofing/phishing, so it makes sense transactional traffic would be hit the hardest with false-positives. Stuff like password-resets, invoices, etc. are more likely to be modeled for these kinds of attacks.
This is an interesting list from Laura Christensen at Return Path. She discusses some of the key factors that will shape email marketing in 2019, including privacy, personalization, and consumer experience:
Significant changes in privacy and permissioning are expected this year. Federal politicians and tech giants are pushing for digital privacy legislation that would supersede California’s law with a more industry-friendly federal bill. Already in January more than a dozen privacy organizations united to unveil a plan that would create a new federal data protection agency focused on regulating the way businesses and other organizations collect and make use of personal data.
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🚀 Meet Conveyor 1.0 — Wildbit’s newest product
Conveyor is our new approach to version control and task management. It replaces your Git client, hosted version control service, and task management with a single, integrated development workflow. You start, finish, and switch tasks—Conveyor handles the branching, merging, and stashing behind the scenes. All the while, it automatically syncs your updates across your teammates’ computers. Everyone stays in the loop without having to update your task management software.
→ Try it today. It’s free for up to two people.
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🎨 What we’ve been working on
More useful weekly account digests
We know from our open rates and follow-up questions that users rely heavily on the information in the email we send every Monday morning with statistics of selected servers. These weekly digest emails have always been useful, but we knew they could be better. So last month we rolled out a new design and some additional information to help you manage your account better.
Read more about the changes in the announcement blog post, and if you don’t currently receive weekly digests for your servers, head over to the profile section of your account to turn them on.
Updates to SMTP sending
If you use SMTP to send mail, there are a couple of updates you should be aware of. First, we added some new IP addresses that you may want to add to your firewall settings. Second, we will disable support for SSL v3 on March 7th, and going forward our servers will only support encrypted SMTP connections using TLS (1.0 - 1.3). More info about that is available here.
Support for Laravel
We’re pretty excited about this one! Laraval 5.8 just shipped, and it includes support for Postmark. If you’d like to know more, check out this short video on how to use the new Postmark driver in one minute.
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🎤 Meet Ilya Sabanin
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This month we turn inward and talk to Ilya Sabanin, one of the developers on Wildbit’s latest product, Conveyor. Yes, yes, that’s pretty biased, but that’s allowed when you launch a new product, right?
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Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you, and what is Conveyor?
My name is Ilya Sabanin, I’m a developer on Conveyor. Conveyor is an app that fuses version control and project management to provide one cohesive workflow that lets you focus on things that matter and automate things that don’t.
How are you using Postmark on Conveyor today? What was it like to do the integration? It’s ok, you can be honest.
We use Postmark for both outbound emailing and inbound email processing. I really wanted to setup my own sendmail service but Natalie and Chris (our CEO and CTO) told me I have to use Postmark (oh well). Jokes aside, we’ve been using Postmark for years for all of our apps and integration has always been super easy and transparent. Once I set it up it just works, I never hear from it.
I especially like the official Rails gem for Postmark, which has always been excellently maintained. It makes my life as a Rails developer a bit easier, which I appreciate.
If you could add one feature to Postmark, what would it be?
It would be great if Postmark supported template partials. Without them maintaining dozens of templates becomes a big burden. [Ed. note: we feel your pain, Ilya. We don’t have a specific timeline for this, but it’s definitely on our radar!]
What advice to you have for fellow developers about how to implement and manage their transactional email?
Have a backup plain text copy for each HTML email template in your app to improve compatibility with various clients and devices. And while you’re at it, test your emails with as many clients as you can. You will be surprised how your emails are rendered on some of them.
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🎵 Last word: from the #music channel
This month Chris B told us about the constantly-streaming YouTube station called lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to, which was a weird coincidence because the same day Rian read a really interesting article about those channels that wonders why lo-fi hip-hop is so conducive to concentration. For a similar but not-quite-the-same vibe, Rian also recommended Sinner's Syndrome by Moderator.
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Until next month — happy sending!
The Postmark Team
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