Welcome to the May Newsletter!
We hope your year is going just swimmingly so far. In this month’s newsletter we bring you some interesting industry tips and developments, an update on our recent product releases, and a special interview with Lee Munroe, the creator of htmlemail.io. Enjoy!
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📰 Industry news and useful tools
In this post Laura Atkins gives an overview of Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI), a new way to present users with visual indicators in the mailbox that a message is really from the brand it says. It’s currently a pilot program only with some brands and a number of consumer mail providers, but this is a development worth keeping an eye on.
This is a really good introductory post by Caity G. O'Connor about the quirks of email coding. She recommends some tutorials and tools to help you navigate your way. And of course, Microsoft Outlook gets its very own dedicated section…
In many cases, you may want to send emails on behalf of your customers. For instance, if you run help desk software but want to use Postmark to power your emails, your customers would probably rather see their brand and domain in their emails, instead of yours. In this guide we show you all the different options available to send on behalf of your customers, and how to decide which option is best for you.
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🎉 What we've been up to
We recently launched Rebound for Postmark — an integration that lets your customers know about delivery issues straight from your web app. Rebound is an embeddable javascript snippet that prompts customers to update their email address if there was a hard bounce to the address they have on file. This way your customers won't be left in the dark about delivery issues. We even provide a notification builder so you can customize the appearance and messaging without having to write a bunch of code.
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Postmark for iOS is your investigative sidekick. It can help you quickly debug and resolve email issues when you’re away from your computer. The app is currently in beta, and we expect to make it available as a free download on the App Store later this year. If you’d like to test out the app, sign up for our beta program. We’d love to get your feedback.
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🎤 Meet Lee Munroe from htmlemail.io
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This month we bring you a special interview with Lee Monroe, the creator of htmlemail.io. We had a great chat and couldn’t fit it all into one newsletter, so be sure to check out our blog post for the full transcript.
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Tell us a little bit about the history of htmlemail.io. How did the idea come about? Why did you decide to start working on it?
A couple of years ago I created a simple responsive email template which I open sourced and put on GitHub. When I shared it with the community it got some traction and I realized that while just a simple template, this solved a big pain for developers. Over the next couple of years I open sourced a few more templates as well as my (Grunt) workflow for creating them.
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Then I started writing about what I had learned. I published blog posts about sending email, building email and responsive email (which I later accumulated in one long post for Smashing Magazine). These posts received positive feedback and I started getting requests to talk about email development at conferences. I had the opportunity to speak at several developer conferences including O’Reilly Fluent Conference in San Francisco and Litmus Email Design Conference in Boston.
I got to this point where I had shared a bunch of knowledge and open sourced a bunch of code. Thanks to the feedback (and website traffic) I felt I had a good amount of validation to “productize” a pack of email templates that would solve 80% of use cases for startups and developers. I invested some time in getting the templates up to a quality standard and testing them across the major email clients then launched HTML Email.
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What has the response been like from the email community?
Fantastic. In 18 months we have over 800 customers. On launch day we were the most hunted website on ProductHunt. Honestly I wasn’t expecting it to be as successful as that. Earlier in the process I had plans to make video tutorials, write a book, offer some more advanced tooling etc. and in the end I decided just to ship what I had, the email templates. Turns out all that stuff, while it would be nice to still offer these at some point, they weren't necessarily needed for launch.
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I think having the shared knowledge out there in blog posts as well as free templates has worked well as a channel. A lot of our referrals come from these blog posts and GitHub. Many developers will read the articles, try the free templates, and have faith that buying the more “polished” pack of templates are worth it. If they’d rather not spend the money or don’t have a budget they can invest a bit of time in looking at the open source workflow and figuring out how to make the templates themselves.
What has the project taught you about email development? Anything surprising or particularly challenging that stands out?
Over the years I’ve learned that 99.99% of developers do not like dealing with email. Cross client support. Inlining CSS. Using tables. Not something a typical developer has desire to deal with.
Of course all companies, apps, services send emails. So at some point someone has to set them up. Usually that someone wants to get in and out as quickly as possible. Sure there are companies that see the full potential and ROI of email and invest in a team. But most teams, especially early on, have a long list of other priorities and for email they want a quick solution that works.
So they’re not going to set up their own email infrastructure. They’re going to use an easy to use plug and play API solution like Postmark. Similarly they don’t want to spend weeks trying to learn how each email client renders HTML, what works and what doesn’t work.
That’s where HTML Email comes in, 10 high quality email templates that will get you up and running very quickly. Most customers say they’ll have their email templates live in less that 24 hours. It saves their developers days or weeks of pain staking agony trying to get their emails working and tested across the major email clients.
For the rest of the interview, check out the blog post.
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🎺 Last word: from the #music channel
Here are some of the things we’ve been recommending to each other recently.
We’re all pretty excited about the new Jon Hopkins album, Singularity. CHVRCHES did a great acoustic live set recently, including this wonderful version of their new song Get Out. On the more jazzy side of things, this new album by the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio is really funky. “Organ trio” is not something
you see very often, so this is definitely worth checking out.
Until next month — happy sending!
The Postmark Team
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