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.
Friday, 12 March 2010
Performance improvements
Last night we rolled out some changes and upgrades to our distributed file system. The general result is that file loading performance is improved across the board. This is particularly noticeable in our files tab (especially for those with thousands of uploaded images), but will also help improve performance for recipients when opening messages with lots of images. Plenty more performance improvements in the pipeline!
Monday, 8 March 2010
Report downloads
A new feature that's been eagerly awaited by some of our customers is now live: downloadable reports. When viewing a report, you can now choose from Excel 2007, Excel 5, PDF and CSV downloads of the report data. No more copy and paste required! You'll also find that the Excel spreadsheets use nicely named ranges and formulae to give you easier integration with your own models and more transparent, easy-to-read calculations.
DNS Update
Further to the problems we experienced with our DNS provider back in January, we're happy to announce we have now successfully switched smartmessages.net to our usual registrar, gandi.net. At the same time, we've renewed our SSL certificate for another couple of years, also with Gandi.
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
Workflow improvements
We've rolled out a few new features to improve responsiveness and reduce clutter in smartmessages accounts. A while ago we rolled out a change to the mailings page that hid older mailings - this has made a massive difference to customers that sends hundreds of mailshots a month. We've extended that further by providing a sliding scale of visibility and reduced the default to 1 month (down from 2). Similarly, the reporting page now only shows recent mailshots in the menu at the top of the page, and this should provide big speedups for those with large numbers of mailshots.
The templates page suffered similar response problems simply because of the volume of entries in some accounts. This could be mitigated by deleting templates, however, that would also delete any mailshots that used them, and our users were not keen on losing data. To remedy this we've introduced a new feature: template archiving. When you edit a template you'll see a new 'Archived' checkbox. Select it and save the template, and it will be removed from the list of templates, and also from the templates shown on the send page template selector. You can always show hidden templates by clicing the 'Show all templates' link at the bottom of the template list. This should go a long way towards improving page load performance and keeping menu contents relevant for out bigger accounts.
The templates page suffered similar response problems simply because of the volume of entries in some accounts. This could be mitigated by deleting templates, however, that would also delete any mailshots that used them, and our users were not keen on losing data. To remedy this we've introduced a new feature: template archiving. When you edit a template you'll see a new 'Archived' checkbox. Select it and save the template, and it will be removed from the list of templates, and also from the templates shown on the send page template selector. You can always show hidden templates by clicing the 'Show all templates' link at the bottom of the template list. This should go a long way towards improving page load performance and keeping menu contents relevant for out bigger accounts.
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
A few new features
A few new features have been rolled out oer the last couple of days:
More features are in the pipeline...
- 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...
Tuesday, 12 January 2010
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.
Monday, 11 January 2010
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)