IE Bugs fixed

A Javascript bug affecting the files page when viewed in Internet Explorer has been fixed today. As always, let us know if you have any trouble with Smartmessages!

System upgraded

This weekend's upgrades took rather longer than anticipated, and led to a few teething problems this morning, however all are now straightened out (and as always, if anything is not working right for you, please tell us).
We have quite a few new features :

• Our API has been expanded to permit upload and management of templates and campaigns.
• DKIM is now used for all messages, including administrative subscribe/unsubscribe notifications.
• Yahoo spam reports (which also includes btinternet, btopenworld and talk21 domains) are handled automatically.
• Improvements in our database design means our servers can run more efficiently, and you should see higher sending rates
• Dynamically generated template and mailshot preview images
• Cosmetic imprevements in Firefox
• Numerous bug, usability and validation fixes

The main purpose of this upgrade was to lay the foundations for even more enhancements in future, so stay tuned!

Scheduled maintenance this weekend

We have some planned maintenance this weekend starting on Saturday 13th December at 15:00 GMT and lasting for several hours. Image serving, click and open tracking will continue as normal, but sending will not be available, and our web interface will be closed.
We're making some changes to our database that will result in even better performance, a whole bunch of new features (API and UI enhancements), and a better foundation for future development.

DKIM is live

We're happy to announce that full DKIM support is now fully enabled for all our customers.
There are two levels of signing available; If you make our public key available in your DNS using the 'sm' selector, we'll sign using that for fully-authenticated email. Failing that, we sign it as an intermediary, which doesn't carry as much weight, but every little helps.
For a guide on what DKIM is all about, why you should be using it and how to set it up, see the entry in our help wiki. Don't forget to add your signing domains to your account on the smartmessages settings page one you've set up your DNS.
A big upside to DKIM is that messages signed with it (even as an intermediary) are eligible for Yahoo!'s feedback loop, and we now support spam report handling from all Yahoo! domains (.com, .co.uk, .fr, .in etc), plus other domains that they handle email for, including some important UK ISPs talk21.com, btinternet.com and others.

Upload improvements

You'll now find there's more info available in your list upload history. As well as the number of addresses in the upload, it also shows the number of completely new contacts and new subscribers (people who you have previously contacted, but not on this list).

There's a small tweak to the reporting page - it now reports the click:open ratio, which is a measure of how interesting your subscribers find your messages.

Coming soon - DKIM support for improved deliverability.

Delays to report generation

We're in the process of upgrading our open and click tracking database system today. Sending and tracking is all working as usual, but there will be delays to report generation today. When it's all complete, we'll be able to develop faster, more flexible reporting than before.

Update: Upgrades are complete, report generation back to normal.

Linux kernel update

You may have heard of this rather nasty security hole found in the Linux kernel last week. Well, tonight we're installing updates for all of our systems to fix it. There should be no down time.

Welcome

Welcome to the Smartmessages.net system status blog. On here you will find news of planned downtime, outages, maintenance and new features. It's hosted at blogger.com so that it's independent of any smartmessages systems.