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!

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.

Major update

We're happy to announce lots of changes in Smartmessages today.

• New colour scheme, layouts and logo!
• More efficient CSS
• Much improved templates page
• Shorter load times on nearly all pages
• Template image report
• Template link report
• Template spam check report
• CSS fixes, especially in Internet Explorer
• More space on mailings page, more consistent styling
• Updated to latest CKEditor
• Updated to latest CKFinder
• Updated to Prototype 1.7
• Updated to jQuery 1.5

We've aso had some infrastructure changes and now all of our servers are running on solid-state disks, meaning higher transfer rates and lower latency for just about everything.

Outage

One of our web servers has developed problems that interfered with our load balancer, taking the smartmessages web interface offline. There should be a new server in place within a few minutes. Mailshot sending is unaffected.

Update 19:10: the new server is in place, all services are fully operational again.

More updates

We've done some optimisations on some of our critical pages. You should now find the mailings page is around 500% faster for those of you with large numbers of mailshots! You should also see a big speed boost to the templates and reports pages.
All that plus the usual round of bug fixes and cleanups.
More to come of course!

System update

We're pleased to announce a set of improvements to the smartmessages.net service.

• Upgraded to the latest CKEditor 3.3 on the send page, CKFinder 2.0 on the files page
• Link to our downloadable user manual from the home page
• Message generator engine tuning should mean better performance on smaller mailshots
• Faster report generation and viewing
• Added downloads of opens and clicks in CSV format from reports
• Downloadable lists of per-mailshot unsubscribes
• Added timestamps to bounce list downloads
• Better HTML validation
• More detail on list upload results
• The usual round of internal bugfixes and minor improvements

Hope you like it!

Unexpected outage

We're currently investigating an outage at our ISP. While we have a fair amount of redundancy, it appears that four of our servers have gone offline at once, suggesting a network or power problem. Though our site is currently not accessible, any scheduled mailshots should proceed as normal. We're chasing our ISP, and will update here when we know more.

Update: There has been a power failure at our ISP. They are investigating.

Update 21:37: Power is restored, all is working again.