We're happy to announce that we've completed deployment of HTTP/2 support across all our services. In addition to our previous support for SSL everywhere and IPv6, we now complete the set with HTTP/2. Expect a fair performance boost on all web page interactions, especially on mobiles.
If you're running a very old browser, you won't see any difference - but there's never been a better time to upgrade!
Smartmessages.net is a privacy-first email marketing system, capable of delivering accurate, personalised content to millions of subscribers while maintaining the highest standards of privacy. This blog is used to show Smartmessages system status – please subscribe so you can be notified of any changes or problems that may affect you.
Tuesday 17 November 2015
Saturday 2 May 2015
Big technical update
We've just rolled out a pretty hefty technical upgrade to our back-end systems.
You should find things work exactly as before, just faster and more securely!
The HSTS header means that we now always serve everything over SSL encryption, including mailshot web versions and images. If you are hosting your own mailshot images on an insecure site, this may mean that recipients viewing a web version are either not shown images or see a security warning about insecure content from your site. To fix this, either upgrade your site to use SSL (we can help with that), or move your image hosting onto our servers.
- Switched our web servers from apache to nginx (faster)
- Updated from PHP 5.4 to 5.6 (faster, better)
- Enabled IPv6 (faster, better on modern networks)
- Updated to SPDY 3.1 (faster)
- Enabled the HSTS header (safer) - we now get an A+ on SSLLabs tests.
The HSTS header means that we now always serve everything over SSL encryption, including mailshot web versions and images. If you are hosting your own mailshot images on an insecure site, this may mean that recipients viewing a web version are either not shown images or see a security warning about insecure content from your site. To fix this, either upgrade your site to use SSL (we can help with that), or move your image hosting onto our servers.
Friday 10 April 2015
System update - lots of new features!
We've been busy improving the system again with lots of new features and fixes:
We've made many other minor changes and fixes, and there is plenty more in the pipeline.
Template conversions
This is the big one: You can now convert templates from Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, EShot and Pure360 on the templates page. Just paste in the template, check the "Convert format" box and it all happens magically. You may need to do some manual cleanup for custom or complex tags, but we have pretty comprehensive support for everything these other systems support (including quite a few undocumented features!). There is documentation to go with it too.New PDF reports
We have completely rewritten our PDF report generator. It's now generating PDFs directly instead of via HTML, which means it produces faster, cleaner, more accurate layouts, and no more page breaks in the middle of graphs!Video tags
You can use our new [[video]] tag to embed videos into your emails.Improved RSS support
Our RSS support is now second to none - with massive flexibility on rendering feed and article-level items, with full support for enclosures too (podcasts).Translation and history links
You can link your email to translated versions courtesy of google translate, and provide links to previous mailings to the same list so you can link your recipients to back-issues.Relative image URLs
When you upload images into Smartmessages, you can now reference them with relative URLs pointing at /images, so if you upload "logo.png", you can now refer to it in a template as "/images/logo.png". This makes it much easier to transfer templates from other systems and local editors like Dreamweaver.VCards
You can attach a VCard to your messages so that it's easier for your recipients to add your address and other contact details to their address books. If you've uploaded a logo for your account, we will embed that in the VCard download.Google+ sharing links
ntly Google did not allow sharing URLs on Google+ via static links (without Javascript). They have now fixed that, and so have we.Content A/B splits
We've supported A/B split tests for a while, but you could only vary the subject line. There is now support for using split identifiers in conditional tags, so you can also vary your message content by split as well.Sharing links
These have been lurking in Smartmessages for a while but we've not mentioned them much - you can now provide simple icons (retina-ready) or text sharing links for many social networks. For example all you need to do to show icons with sharing links to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn and Pinterest is say [[share]]! Details are in the template guide.Google+ sharing links
Until recently Google did not allow sharing URLs on Google+ via static links (without Javascript). They have now fixed that, and so have we.More template tags
There are lots of small improvements and additions in our template tags and variables, all covered in our updated template guide.We've made many other minor changes and fixes, and there is plenty more in the pipeline.
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