Can you tell us a little bit about your experience and the work you do?
I run a small software company in Barcelona, Spain. In 2017 we launched our first SaaS product, Feature Upvote. It lets your customers openly suggest and upvote improvements to your product.
We created Feature Upvote because tracking feature requests for our own product was a mess. We tried using Jira, Trello, and a spreadsheet. None of these worked well for us. The existing feature tracking products were complicated and expensive. We wanted a no-nonsense approach that focused on the core task of tracking feature requests. We figured if we needed this product, there were probably other teams who did too. That turned out to be a correct!
How are you using Postmark on Feature Upvote today?
We use Postmark to send all our transactional emails. We rely on Postmark to track whether emails are being delivered and opened. Before using Postmark we simply didn't know if emails were being sent to whom we intended, being received, and being opened.
Our previous transactional email provider was AWS SES. To find out whether emails were being delivered and opened, we would need to implement exactly what Postmark offers. I'm a strong believer in “don’t build what you can buy”, so switching from AWS SES to Postmark was an easy decision.
Postmark’s server overview has become our tool for making sure scheduled tasks that send large numbers of emails are functioning. While we can monitor this using our own app’s dashboard, Postmark helps us see that the emails were actually delivered, with the content we expected, at the time we expected.
We also use a Postmark webhook to be notified of bounced emails. This helps us identify accounts with fake or mistyped email addresses.
If you could add one feature to Postmark, what would it be?
The filter system on the Server -> Activity screen is good, but as far as I can tell, there is no way to save a set of filters. It would be helpful if I could save certain frequently used filters, and rapidly switch between them from a drop-down menu.
Ed. note: This is a great idea, Steve! We’re adding that to our list of improvements to the Activity page.
If you could give fellow developers one piece of advice about how to implement and manage their transactional email, what would it be?
Not monitoring transactional emails can be costly. Here's a story that illustrates the need to carefully monitor your transactional emails.
We send weekly summary emails to our customers. Due to a coding error, we were inadvertently sending these emails to cancelled accounts and to other people who shouldn't be receiving them. This is the type of action that leads to frustrated recipients marking emails as spam, potentially harming our overall deliverability. It is also not good for our company's reputation.
Postmark's insight into email activity helped us discover this bug. We were very grateful to have picked this up. Without Postmark, we would not have realized this was happening. By detecting this bug and some related bugs, we were able to significantly reduce the number of emails we send each month.