Tuesday 29 March 2011

Minor update

We've rolled out some small changes recently.
  • Updated user guide (linked from the home page)
  • Improved display of status updates on home page
  • Improved responsiveness of mailshot progress on mailings page
  • Removed ability to delete mailshots
  • Improved feedback when mailshots are initialising or pausing
  • Added ability to stop (and abandon any unsent messages) a paused mailshot
  • Avoided some database locks that were causing occasional problems
  • Improved parallelism so smaller mailshots will send faster
Removing the ability to delete mailshots might seem curious, but there are several reasons behind that decision:
  • Unintentional deletion (despite the warnings!) was a common source of support problems.
  • Only mailshots in the last month are shown by default, so interface clutter isn't a problem.
  • Mailshots get 'retired' after 6 months (raw data is deleted, static reports are saved), so they don't clutter our database.
  • It's good for data protection compliance (particularly CAN-SPAM) to keep mailshots around for a while.
  • It's good for accountability.
Plenty more good stuff to come!

Monday 14 March 2011

Short outage

A glitch with our database monitoring system knocked out database connections between 16:21 and 16:35 UTC, during which time you wouldn't have been able to log in to Smartmessages. All fixed now.