WORK[etc] Web App Blog

Late last week we successfully rolled out a fundamental change to the e-mail system that powers WORKetc.  This is big news as it allows us to not only improve end-recipient deliverability, but also include a bunch of cool tracking features. 

For example you can now see if an invoice was received by a client and then also if they opened that email.  The same goes for any type of email WORKetc sends.  Awesome.

Previously we managed our own mail servers, sending both transactional (ie customer invoices, alerts) and mass email (ie email newsletters) through the same system.  The problem was that occasionally, email from WORKetc would get blocked by a recipient's ISP.  It wasn't so much that our customers were sending spam (they weren't) but rather we just weren't sending enough volume to build any sort of credibility with the major networks.

Some ISP's would edge on the side of caution and block WORKetc email simply because we had zero profile, good or bad.  I need to stress that this was a very minor issue, applying to only a handful of emails out of the 10,000+ flowing through the system each week.

The entire solution took a few months to research and implement, mainly due to the vagrancies between the "popular" SMTP mail server providers.  We needed a provider that would allow both transactional email and mass email, that wouldn't throw their own code into sent emails, supported at least a 5MB attachment, was quick to send and who provided basic SMTP server access (as opposed ot an API) so we could instantly switch servers if they ever went down. 

We worked with and went right through the full list of providers and feel like we know their services inside and out now.  If anyone is interested in a detailed review of Jango, Critsend, MessageGears, Postmark and others then let me know and I'll post. 

In the end we went with Socketlabs and so far all email continues to pump out smoothly.  We can't recommend their team enough in terms of rapid support.

On to the new features...

Powerful Email Diagnostic Tracking
As every email send attempt is logged in your business database, you can now bring up a delivery report to confirm when/how a message was sent.

Messages sent successfully would be denoted on the WORKetc UI like this;



If a delivery failure or bounce is later detected, the status will be changed according, e.g;



And of course if an email has been opened by the recipient, you'll see this notice:





Email Delivery Reporting
Users with access to reports may at any time generate a REPORT on email deliveries. This is available under Reports > View Reports, and selecting the new "System: Email Delivery" option. The output looks something like this;