Handling email delivery issues with Postmark
The best way to improve and demonstrate a product is to use it yourself. I’m amazed at how many little improvements I find when I sign up as a new user in our products. Those are the hidden details that we rarely see even if we use our own products. To demonstrate the power behind Postmark and bring some value into Beanstalk, we decided the best way is to implement our latest feature for our own use. This is how we handle bounced emails in Beanstalk, all through Postmark’s bounce web hooks.
What are bounced emails and why do I care?
Let’s say you are the account owner or admin on Beanstalk. You invited a client or coworker a long time ago, but they recently changed their email address. The previous address no longer exists, so when Beanstalk tries to send the latest commit notification or comment notification it fails, or “bounces back.” This could be really bad news and cause some terrible miscommunication (“You never respond to my emails!”). This is where Postmark comes in.
Since we use Postmark for all of our outbound email, we can also track delivery issues like hard bounces, spam complaints, soft bounces, and so on. Even better, the entire thing is built on an API, which means we have direct access to the data. So when an issue occurs, we can help our customers recover and avoid continued problems.
Using web hooks to solve the problem
Here’s how it works. Each time Postmark detects a bounce, it pings a secure URL on Beanstalk using our latest web hooks feature. Beanstalk then parses this data, determines the bounce type, and displays a notification in the dashboard. It looks like this:
If you are the account owner, you may see issues for multiple users:
This way, either the user or account owner can fix the email to avoid it from happening again.
Happy and informed customers
A phrase we like to use when talking about Postmark is that “you’re blind” when it comes to email delivery. You are, in fact, because without tools like this you would never know that the emails bounced and your users are missing important messages. Now we have an easy way to recover, keeping our customers informed and happy about the service we provide.
If this sounds interesting, go ahead and check out Postmark. We just recently launched to the public.
