Hi ,
Welcome to the July edition of the Postmark Newsletter. We have some great news and tools to share with you this month, as well as a new customer interview with helpful tips to improve your emails. Let’s get to it!
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Industry news and useful tools
The team at fortrabbit wrote about their experiences with transactional email in their app. This isn’t just a list of general guidelines — it’s an article about communication, design and web tech, so we think you’ll find it useful. And we’re not just saying that because they’re Postmark customers 😏
We don’t currently provide localization services built into our templating engine, but we know many of our customers do their own translations. Translation Exchange is a platform for template localization, and they recently built a Postmark integration that makes it easy to manage your translations.
In this article Guy Ligertwood shares his notes from a Google I/O 2017 talk by three UX writers. There are some really good tips in here that should be useful to improve your transactional emails as well.
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What we've been up to
Improved DMARC reports
Do you use our DMARC tool? If not, you should! Especially now, because we just released some great updates that make the report way more useful. If you’re not familiar with the DMARC tool, it’s a weekly digest we provide to anyone (for free!). We process the XML reports from major ISPs about your domain’s DMARC alignment, and turn them into easy-to-read weekly email digests.
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There's a guide for that
To learn more about how DMARC can help you monitor and secure your email delivery, read our DMARC guide.
Read Guide →
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A brand new Getting Started guide
We have great educational content and extensive API documentation, but in talking to new customers we realized there was a bit of a gap between deciding to use Postmark and actually digging in to the API docs. We also know that every app is different, so not everyone needs every feature we provide.
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Always read the manual
So we wrote The Manual. It’s an easy-to-follow Getting Started guide to help you figure out the best way for you to integrate with Postmark. We’d love for you to share this around if you have friends and colleagues who are just getting started with transactional email!
Read the manual →
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Something on the side
Our team often works on their own side projects in their spare time. Some of those might be of interest to you, so we wanted to highlight a few in the newsletter as well.
Patrick (Customer Success) built a quick-start app you can use to host your own URLs for receiving, storing, processing, and viewing webhooks sent from Postmark. Check out Postmark Hooks on Github.
Meanwhile Garrett (Marketing) is hard at work on a book, podcast, and related materials under the banner Starting and Sustaining. It’s all about how to build, launch, market, grow, and support your own product.
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Meet Dave Marshall, CTO of Childcare.co.uk
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In this month's customer interview we talk to Dave Marshall from Childcare.co.uk. He tells us about his experience with Postmark, and how important automated testing is to them.
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Can you tell us a little bit about your experience and the work you do?
I'm the CTO at Childcare.co.uk, I oversee all technology aspects of the business. However, we're only a small team, so I still get to spend most of my time getting my hands dirty across the full stack.
How are you using Postmark on projects today?
Postmark is used for all of our transactional emails. I think we're getting close to around 3 million a month. A handful are the essential ones, like activation and password reset emails, but most of them are notification type emails that really help drive engagement across our platform. We'd struggle to provide the same kind of value to our customers without the email notifications hitting inboxes. We're also using Postmark to process incoming emails for our custom help desk software.
If you could add one feature to Postmark, what would it be?
I honestly couldn't think of any feature I would add, Postmark seems to fit our use case perfectly. I guess if I had to ask for something, I'd ask to have the 45 days worth of activity storage extended, we don't use it very often, but it is so useful when we do.
If you could give fellow developers one piece of advice about how to implement and manage their transactional email, what would it be?
For me, covering our transactional emails and the conditions that trigger them with automated tests is a real winner. Not only do the tests protect us against regressions, but they provide an easy way to generate the necessary conditions to trigger and render the emails. Even if I'm just tweaking some styles, I can use the tests to trigger the email with real looking data and view it in my email client, or even fire it off to something like Litmus.com.
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Last word: from the #books channel
Last month we gave you some recommendations from our #music channel in Slack, so this month we wanted to let you know what we’re reading.
We’re big sci-fi fans over here, so Shane (Marketing) and Rian (Product) have been making their way through the Red Rising series (please don’t tell them that it’s supposed to be Young Adult fiction). Chris (Customer Success) appears to only be able to read books written by Brandon Sanderson, and he recommends Steelheart this month.
And with that, we'll just say happy sending until next month!
The Postmark Team
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