The EU Cookie Directive

This Wednesday (May 25th), a new law comes into force affecting the ability of web sites to issue cookies to visitors. Under this legislation, web site hosts will require explicit informed consent from visitors before issuing cookies unless they are 'strictly necessary' to provide the service. Unfortunately the UK has been slow to legislate on this directive, so the law is extremely vague. What exactly 'strictly necessary' means is currently undefined, however, an example of a cookie that would not be considered 'strictly necessary' is the ability to remember your login on a login page.

There is a document issued by the UK Information Commissioner's office contains an overview of the new law and how it will apply to businesses that you might like to read.

For our part, we think we're in a good position for compliance. We don't use cookies to store login details or other account preferences - browsers do a good enough job of that nowadays. We do use session cookies for authenticating logins, but they would fall under the 'strictly necessary' use case (our service simply won't work without them). They contain solely a random number hash, are deleted on logout, and expire after a couple of hours, so have very little scope for any kind of personal data leakage and certainly no cross-site tracking, which is one of the chief concerns of the legislation.

We don't issue cookies to normal visitors at all, including those that are opening or clicking through from links in email messages. That said, another aspect of this legislation may apply to the use of tracking images (a.k.a. web bugs or beacons), but it remains to be seen what regulations are made in that area.

The most obvious point of concern for this legislation is for services that do track activity across sites, most obviously pretty much any web analytics system such as Google Analytics and many ad issuing services, such as Google AdWords, doubleclick etc. Google have yet to comment on the issue, but there is some discussion of it here. We're not concerned by ads since we don't use them anywhere, but Google Analytics is a very useful service that we do link with, and while we don't use cookies in conjunction with it (we just generate the specially formatted URLs it uses), you may well do on your own site. The requirement to obtain explicit informed consent for such services may prove extremely detrimental to both consumers and providers alike. Without that consent, providers can't target incentives and campaigns appropriately to visitors, and web advertising is likely to become much more random as a result.

In the short term there's little to be worried about. Communications Minister Ed Vaizey has said "We do not expect the ICO to take enforcement action in the short term against businesses and organisations as they work out how to address their use of cookies."

We'll keep you posted on any changes that may affect your use of our services.

Scheduled maintenance May 4th - updated

We are performing a major software upgrade on our mail servers on the evening of Wednesday May 4th, starting from 6pm UK time and lasting for 2-3 hours. The Smartmessages web interface will remain available, but no mailshots will be sent during the maintenance window.

Update: I'm sorry to report that our software upgrades were curtailed by a major hardware failure last night. We're working on a fix.

Update: We've now provisioned new servers to take over the failed servers and all services are now running normally. Many apologies for the delay to today's sends.

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!