New features: RSS and more!

We're very happy to announce some big new features:
RSS
Many customers have asked for this, and it's finally here! We've had internal suport for it for years, but now it's out in the open. You can now build templates that dynamically import content from an RSS feed at send time, and you can format the overall feed and the stories within it separately. This is  great way to shorten the amount of time it takes to prepare a newsletter as you don't have to refomat content from elsewhere - just point it at your blog/CMS and have it pull in your latest stories automatically. Docs on how to use it are on our wiki.
Social network integration
We now have tags for Facebook 'like', Google+ '+1', Twitter 'tweet' and LinkedIn 'share' buttons. Just drop the tags into your templates and the rest will happen automatically, complete with open graph tags, allowing the networks to find important details about your mailings easily. You'll see a new section in reports for the stats you've got on social network activity. There are quite a few considerations when using social network buttons, so please read the docs.
Revamped callbacks system
Our callbacks system has had a major overhaul, has some new events, selective event registration, more consistent parameters, better handling of failures, and now supports retrying if your system is down. Of course there is updated documentation to go with it.
Gravatars
Gravatars allow to you to obtain personalised icons associated with an email address via gravatar.com. If a user has set their own icon, it will be used, otherwise it will generate a unique one from their address. For example, here's the one for info@smartmessages.net:

and here's one for an address that has no predefined icon (and is thus generated automatically):

We've been using them in our admin interface for some time, but now you can use them in your templates too.
There are lots of other small tweaks throughout the system, and as always, there's plenty more to come!

Network outage: resolved

A network problem at our hosting provider caused several of our servers to be cut off between 14:05 and 14:26 today. All services have now been restored.

New bounce report

When you look at a report for one of your mailshots, you'll find a new link to a bounce report for it. This shows a more detailed breakdown of the kind of bounces that you've received, and the top 20 domains responsible for them.

System slowdown: Fixed

We're currently investigating a problem with slow sending. Messages are still sending, just very slowly. We're working on this now, so please come back here for status updates.

Update: The slowdown problem turned out to have been caused by some unusually large user-supplied content exposing a major bottleneck. The slowdown had actually been happening for a long time, it had just never had content of a type to cause it to slow down so much and make its presence felt. This underlying problem has now been fixed, with a bonus that we're now seeing much higher send speeds than before! All pending mailshots have now been sent. We apologise for the inconvenience, but hope you'll enjoy the improved performance.

Now on GitHub!

Somehow it slipped through the cracks and we failed to announce it, but a little while ago we put our Smartmessages API client libraries for PHP and .NET on github, so please feel free to fork, report issues and submit pull requests.

More Goodies!

The downtime last weekend allowed us to make some database optimisations which we're now able to reap the benefits from.

• Our redirected URLs now use the nice short 'smm.im' domain, and we've also shortened our unique identifiers, and switched our URL encoding scheme to one that should be more robust.
• We now track links in 'area' tags for those of you that use image maps.
• Mailshot previews and web versions no longer use SSL, which makes them a bit quicker.
• Optimisations in redirect generation and template processing should result in faster sends.
• Javascript improvements in our template page that should result in more reliable saving.

We have more improvements in the pipeline to make good on our database changes, so stay tuned...

Scheduled maintenance Aug 13th

We will be conducting some maintenance tasks on the evening of Satuday 13th August. Smartmessages services will be unavailable for several hours starting from 7pm UK time.