This is a monthly newsletter to keep you updated on Postmark features and product announcements, as well as email best practices and industry news.
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Welcome to the first Newsletter of 2021! I hope you had a good start to the year so far as we eek our way out of the 2020 madness. We have a lot to share with you today, so let’s get to it!
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🎨 Our Craft CMS plugin now supports Message Streams
We’re excited to share that we’ve teamed up with our friends at Craft to give the Postmark plugin an update to support Message Streams.
With Message Streams, we’ve built a parallel but completely separate sending infrastructure for broadcast and transactional emails so you can send bulk emails—your newsletters, product updates, or promotions—without impacting the delivery of your transactional emails.
Message Streams support for the Postmark plugin means you can now use the power of Postmark to send all your email from Craft, whether that’s transactional or promotional messages.
Read more about the Craft update here →
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Oh, also! You’ve always been able to reactivate unsubscribed recipients via the API, but this is now available in the Postmark UI as well. Read the update on reactivating suppressed subscribers for more info.
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👔 Office Hours for Message Streams
Delightful. Lovely. Amazing. That’s just a few of the words that our customers have used to describe Postmark’s customer support. Now, we’re
experimenting with a brand new way for you to pick our team’s brains: Postmark Office Hours. Picture our office hours as a (virtual) fireside chat where you get to ask our support, product, and deliverability experts all your burning questions about Postmark. Our inaugural session will be all about Message Streams. We’d love to see you there!
Save your seat →
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📘 Big updates to the SMTP Field Manual
We believe email delivery shouldn’t be a mysterious black box. That’s why we created the SMTP Field Manual: an open-source app for documenting SMTP bounce responses from around the world. SMTP bounce responses are three-digit codes a mail server provides to tell you the status of a message sent. They’re incredibly helpful for
troubleshooting deliverability issues, but these responses can vary wildly from one receiver to another. The SMTP Field Manual offers more transparency about the kinds of bounces your message might encounter.
We’re happy to announce some big additions to the field manual: a more comprehensive list of SMTP error codes, more guidance to understand the severity of SMTP responses, and actionable advice for troubleshooting. To learn more about what’s new—and find out how you can get involved (we need your help!)—read the full update .
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📰 Industry news and helpful tools
This is a great primer on some common terms we deal with every day in the email word, such as Sender Reputation, DMARC, SPF, and DKIM. That said, I know I’m biased, but our DMARC guide is still the best out there.
Another great post from our friends at Litmus to help developers shorten their email development time. Tips include the use of email frameworks, CSS inliners, and how to structure your code better.
An interesting, thought-provoking post from Julia Evans. She goes through some common myths about email marketing, including that sending email is inherently bad, unsubscribes are the end of the world, and you have to trick people into signing up for your email marketing list.
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🚨 Upcoming TLS configuration changes for API users—action may be required
Finally, we wanted to mention an important upcoming security change.
On April 13, 2021 we are making some changes to our TLS (Transport Layer Security) configurations for API access. The short version is that we are going to (1) disable TLSv1 access, (2) disable all RC4 and low-strength ciphers, and (3) add HSTS headers. These changes may affect your application’s ability to continue to send mail through Postmark, so please read the full update for more information and what your next steps are.
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Until next month—happy sending!
Rian
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Rian van der Merwe
Head of Product
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