IE bugs fixed

We've added workarounds so that https (secure) downloads now work properly in Internet Explorer (which is horribly broken in this area). We also fixed a couple of mixed-security mode alerts that were only reported in IE.

Updated API documentation

Our API has been evolving over time, and while our PHP example code is up to date, our API documentation wasn't keeping up.  It's now been updated to cover the more recent changes, such as campaign creation, template uploads, and the big one - sending mailshots.
Of course there's more to come too...

New reporting page, bounce processing

You may have noticed already, but we've rolled out some new features today:

• New report page with clearer graphs, more stats, more detail, more downloads
• Our new bounce processor is now working, so you should see much better classification and clearer bounce reports
• The home page has a feed of updates to this blog, and also a list of your 5 most recent mailshots, so you can go straight to your latest info
• The usual round of bug fixes and minor tweaks

We hope you like the new features, and as always, let us know if there's anything you'd like to see.

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!

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.

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.