A few new features

A few new features have been rolled out oer the last couple of days:

• API now supports creation, updating and deleting mailing lists and campaign folders - demo code and PHP client class updated to match
• Mailshots can now be moved between campaign folders on the report page
• Minor speedups site-wide

More features are in the pipeline...

New template tags

A small addition to our template editor. There are four new tags available:

• [[mailshot_id]] - Our internal ID of the mailshot, useful for generating mailshot-unique URLs.
• [[campaign_id]] - The internal ID for the campaign the mailshot is stored in, useful for agregating stats across multiple related mailshots.
• [[mailshot_timestamp]] - The time (as a unix timestamp) this particular mailshot was sent - will be the same for all messages in a given mailshot.
• [[message_timestamp]] - The time (as a unix timestamp) that an individual message was sent. Note that this will not be unique as we send several hundred messages per second.

If you're using tags like these for generating URLs for analytics purposes, remember that we have built-in Google analytics support which will automatically populate appopriate URL parameters without you having to do anything.

DNS trouble

Some of you have reported that it looks like our site is down - including this page! The DNS provider (enom.com) that hosts the smartmessages.net domain has been having intermittent problems with their name servers. The site is actually fine, but the DNS just isn't telling your browser how to get there. They don't have an estimated time to fix and no status page. Needless to say we will be switching providers as soon as possible.

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.