Are you an asynchronous non-blocking operator?

Just kidding (of course you are).

Would you be excited about working with a tight-knit team of experienced developers and product managers to create a world class web-infrastructure application? Let’s talk.

The Working Group began PostageApp about three years ago to solve our own problem of high volume application-driven transactional email delivery, management and reporting. Since the launch of our API-based commercial plans we’ve seen massive growth in both paying customers and sending volume. We’ve also seen many other competitors join the transactional email race, including offerings from Amazon and Mailchimp. To maintain our edge we’ve built our own queuing, delivery and reputation system, and are ramping up our development to keep pace with growth and to launch PostageApp v3 in 2013. This is where you come in – we’re looking to hire a great developer who love tinkering with the guts of the internet.

Please score yourself:

Score +1 for each of the following languages that you have more than 3 years experience working with: Ruby, Python, Perl, Javascript.

Score -2 if you do not routinely use a testing framework.

Score +1 if you use git extensively.

Score +2 for being very comfortable working in an *nix / linux environment.

Score +1 for each of the following database platforms that you have used in a live production environment: mySQL, Postgres, Redis.

Score +2 if you’ve used a distributed message queue (ZeroMQ, RabbitMQ, Beanstalk, Kafka)

Score +2 if you are familiar with RFC 2822.
Score -2 if you didn’t know what an RFC was.

Score +2 for any mail generating library you have worked extensively with.

Score +2 if you have Postfix or Qmail or Exim or Sendmail administration experience.
Score -2 if you want to continue working with them.

Score +2 if you have done significant work with a large-scale distributed systems.

Score +2 if you have created an API for a production environment.

Score +1 if you have used Chef or Puppet or other deployment automation tools.

Score – 5 if you’ve only used ftp to deploy applications.

Score +1 if you ride a bike.

Score +1 if you play an instrument.

Score +1 if you speak another language.

Score +2 if you are a dog or cat.

Let us know your score by sending an email to jobs@postageapp.com. Tell us a bit about yourself, what you’ve worked on, what kinds of problems you like to solve. We’ll follow up and arrange a time to chat.

More about TWG

PostageApp is an API-based email delivery service that provides developers with tools to manage email templates and track engagement. PostageApp was founded by the team at The Working Group Inc., and is co-located at TWG’s Toronto HQ.

TWG is a web and mobile agency for designers, coders, thinkers and friends. Each day we pour all of our creative energy into what we love, and that makes getting out of bed in the morning the easiest decision we make all day.

We’ve got a great team, and environment down here on Adelaide St. and we get the opportunity to work with Startups, on our own software product – PostageApp, as well as recognized brands like Globe and Mail, CBC, Freshbooks. We even have bi-annual work retreats, monthly community events, tasty coffee and tea.

For some, working at TWG will be a career, for others, it will be a stepping stone on the way to even greater things. And we’re fine with that, because we know that everyone’s path is a little bit different. In fact TWG’s Big Hairy Audacious Goal is to be the best software company in the world to learn, work and grow at. We love our work, and that makes it fun to create incredible web and mobile experiences for our clients, partners and community.

You can read more about us on our website and here on our blog.

A year ago we ate cake.

It was PostageApp’s 1st birthday since we exited beta. We reminisced on the year that passed, and shared some of our upcoming new releases.

Since then we’ve taken off with a whirlwind year of feature enhancement, accelerated growth and amazing interaction with our customers.  Here’s a few of the things which kept us busy (and caused us to neglect this blog a bit):

• We launched our Email Delivery Engine
• We got our hands dirty with DKIM / SPF, to help your emails hit inboxes
• We quintupled our monthly sending volume
• We introduced new pricing plans – including 1,000,000 per month with Pterodactyl, and 30-day trials on our Pigeon and Falcon plans
• We provided new analytics for your dashboard
• We rolled out new API functionality
• And yes, our revenue has grown healthily.

Today we peck at our lunch at our desks… no cake. Our heads are down working on the product we love and care for – we don’t really know how else to celebrate? What we do know is that our goal has always been (and still is) to grow PostageApp into the premier email delivery and management service, and help provide insight into your business and user engagement along the way.

Anniversaries are a great time for reflection, and we realized we’ve slipped slightly in communicating with all of you (we’re email nerds not social media gurus, but we should be able to tweet!). We’re committing to improving that right away, starting with more frequent blog entries to keep you posted on updates, enhancements and tips.

There’s exciting things ahead for PostageApp in the coming year, and your feedback is critically important to keeping us on the flight path.  Here’s a few things zipping around the skunkworks right now that you can expect to hit production before the Pigeon puts on its birthday hat again:

• Better insights into your deliverability and reputation
• Proactive assistance for you to start campaigns on the right foot
• Speeding up all the things : Dashboard, Delivery, Reporting…
• Enhancements to the templating engine – loops, libraries and more
• Some pretty significant API expansions for recipient-level management
• Larger plans by popular demand!

So here’s to another year – we look forwarding to growing our capabilities and spreading our wings just as your companies are coming on in leaps and bounds.

To give your emails the best possible chance of making it into the inbox, we have released support for DKIM, as well as the DKIM and SPF record validator. Check out our documentation on how to implement it.

What are DKIM and SPF?

DKIM and SPF are vital pieces in the pursuit of guaranteed email delivery.

DomainKeys Identified Mail, or DKIM, is a method for your domain to authorize PostageApp to send outgoing messages on your behalf by cryptographically adding a signature to the emails. It gives senders complete accountability over the messages sent through the domain and gives email providers (like Yahoo! and Gmail) reassurance that the message is legitimate. DKIM for emails is as important as SSL certificates for websites.

Sender Policy Framework, or SPF, is a method to prevent email spam by ensuring that the server that delivered your email was given consent by your domain. In effect, your domain provides the email providers with a list of places that email has been allowed to come from. SPF for emails is your domain’s whitelist for email servers.

Why is it important?

Email delivery is not an exact science. Email providers (like Yahoo! and Gmail) give you a vague idea of how to get the best chance to get inside their inboxes, but email standards will vary depending on the provider.

However, DKIM and SPF are both ubiquitous standards for email providers. Together, you get the highest possible chance for successful delivery. Without proper DKIM and SPF records, you run the risk of lower email delivery rates or emails landing in the Spam folder.

How do I use DKIM and SPF with PostageApp?

We have created a very handy-dandy guide on implementing DKIM and SPF with your domain using PostageApp. The only pre-requisite of the DKIM and SPF record setup process is that you need to have access to the DNS records of your domain.

Once you have created the appropriate TXT records, PostageApp will give you the green light and you should be good to go.

Contact us if you have any questions about implementing DKIM and SPF with PostageApp.

Happy sending!

Most developers are not experienced at setting up and deploying an email delivery system for their applications. Here are the baseline requirements for an email delivery solution for your application:

1. A method of constructing IETF standard email messages
2. Emails are reliably delivered into the inboxes of all your users
3. Diagnostics and reporting on delivery status and transmission errors
4. Collects engagement data for email, such as open and click rates

You will also have to take into account other considerations:

• Do you have the expertise to setup and maintain an email server?
• Do you need any training related to your email platform?
• Are you ready for the potential frustration and headaches that come with building your own solution?
• Do you want the responsibility that comes with running an email server?

Beyond that, we can also compare the resources required to build your own mail solution versus using an email service provider. In this example, we will be using Postfix as a representative email server, typical of what a developer would use.

Now you can compare the number of steps required to get a barebones Postfix server set up compared with using an email service provider.

An experienced developer can, on average, get Postfix up and running from anywhere between 1 and 4 hours. At this stage, Postfix will deliver any properly constructed emails, but getting these emails out of your email framework may prove challenging. Monitoring of the delivery status and engagement data will also take more time to implement.

In addition, there are several features that may be missing:

• Templates that non-technical people can edit and deploy
• Bulk email processing and queueing
• Whitelisting of IP addresses
• Applying for preferred sender status at various ISPs
• Monitoring for blacklisting

Conclusion

When making the decision on building versus buying an email solution for your application, there is much more to the process than the work that goes into building a mail server. Features like email delivery monitoring and analytics for emails requires a lot more research and development time that could have gone into your own application.

Rather than spending a few hours on creating a decent solution, developers and designers should focus their energies and resources on building incredible applications.

After relaying millions of emails for our customers we are now taking the next step: PostageApp is now an end-to-end email delivery engine. View our new pricing & plans.

Our new battle tested sending engine (Pigeon Rocket) was built over the past year from the blood, sweat, and tears of our developers. We’ll now take care of your entire email chain from templating, to queuing, to sending and tracking – so you can focus on building an incredible app.

More delivery analytics…

With our new sending engine, we are also deploying new analytics for PostageApp. We’ve gotten very good at delivering your emails, and now we want to show you the tales that your emails can tell:

Send larger batches…

We wanted to give our customers a little extra love by increasing sending volumes for plans across the board. We are also introducing the Pterodactyl plan: 1,000,000 emails per month!

This is just the first step in the many to come, and we would love to have you signup for a free trial. We look forward to sending your emails.

Dear PostageApp customers,

As of 8:54AM EDT, PostageApp is currently experiencing downtime.

Please stay tuned for more updates. We are on it and are going to bring it up as soon as possible.

Thanks for your patience.

Given the time crunch for the competition, there’s barely enough time for anything. Getting your app configured to send email is one of those things that can prove to be far more time-consuming than you expect, especially if you’re not prepared.

Here’s a quick-start guide for getting your Node application set up and ready to roll in just a few minutes.

1. Install the Module

With Node, there are two really easy ways to bring a module into your app: using the Node Package Manager (NPM) or a manual download.

Using the Node Package Manager (NPM)

Using the Node Package Manager is by far the easiest and quickest way to get a module installed into your Node app. All you have to do is run this command in the root of your application:

Manual Install

Manually installing is just slightly more tedious than installing via NPM, but it’s just as simple!

• Download the module files from our GitHub account
• Unzip the file you just downloaded, and copy the contents over to your app’s node_module folder
• Rename the folder from postageapp-nodejs to postageapp

2. Get a PostageApp API Key

Log in to your PostageApp account and make sure you create at least one project. Once you have a project associated with your account, you should be able to see an API key specific to that project. Once you have the API key, you can include the PostageApp plugin into your Node.JS app by using the following code:

For Node Knockout teams we’ll set up accounts that can send messages directly, or you can configure your own SMTP server if you have one handy.

3. Creating a Parent Template

It’s not hard to send great looking email messages if you have the right tools. Email clients are notoriously particular about what kind of HTML they accept, and even support for CSS is extremely limited. One big feature of PostageApp is that you’re able to create a nice HTML template, add in a CSS file, and the two will be combined in an email-friendly markup format that you can preview before sending to ensure it’s working properly.

Every new project comes with a sample layout you can customize with your own logo, CSS theme, and of course content. A parent template can be used to establish common headers and footers without having to cut and paste these to every type of message you’ll be making. These are available under the Message Templates tab of any project page.

To explain how this works, let’s create a very simple parent template by going to the Message Templates tab and clicking on the Create a New Template link just above the list of templates. You’ll get an empty editor screen you can use to create it.

Add a simple layout that looks something like this in the HTML tab edit area:

The mysterious double-curly symbol-with-a-star-in-it {{ * }} in the middle is the location where the template content will go.

You can preview the template at any time and see how it should look in a regular email client. Warnings about your HTML and CSS are reported here, so if you’re making use of exotic, cutting-edge features like background images that some ornery email clients like Outlook don’t support, you’ll get a heads up here. You can always use the Send test email button located just below the editor to see how the email looks in your own client, or through an email previewing service if you use one.

Without some CSS this is going to look really plain. As you design your app, it’s easy to snip key styles and paste them into the CSS tab of the template editor.

Before you can save this template, you have to give it a template slug. For layouts, this is really just a descriptive name you can use to remember what layout it is. In this case call it something like default_layout so it’s easily identified later.

The Subject and From fields generally only apply to child templates themselves, not parent templates.

Save your template and you should be ready for the next step.

4. Create a Child Template

Having a parent template is great, but without something to go into it, you won’t get much use out of it. A message template can be created as you usually would, within your Node application, but it’s usually far easier to have the templates within PostageApp so you can edit them without having to redeploy your application. Think of this as CMS for your email messages where you can make changes at any time and see the results immediately.

A typical application sends out dozens of different messages to its users. When you sign up, when you confirm your registration, when you forget your password, when you haven’t been active in a while, when you invite someone, when you receive a message from someone, or even for general announcements or special offers. It can be difficult to maintain these if you have to check in and deploy your application to make even the smallest change.

A good example is an invitation email sent by one user to someone else. Create a New Message Template again. This time we’ll use the parent template created in the last step to give an otherwise boring email some style.

Here’s a sample invitation that can be pasted into the HTML tab edit area:

There are two variables here you can customize with user data when sending the message, {{ app_name }} and {{ signup_link }}. Through the API you can set some of these the same for everyone, or customize each field individually for each recipient.

Set the parent layout to be the parent template created in the earlier step.

You can set the default From address here, or assign it later when making the API call. The same goes for the Subject. You can also use template variables in the subject to personalize it. In this case, set the subject to:

If you preview the message now, you should see the template wrapped neatly inside the layout.

Set the Template Slug to be invitation and save the message.

You’re now ready to set up something to trigger this message.

5. Sending an Email with Node

To send emails through PostageApp using the Node plugin, you have to create a hash with all of the arguments that you need, and then make the API call using the payload which we assembled. Here’s an example of what assembling a payload looks like:

For a better idea of how to use the arguments, take a look at the Node.JS plugin’s GitHub page for further examples and elaboration.

Once you have your arguments set up, all you have to do is make an API call.

Recap!

From here you can go and customize this as required, add other notifications, and create new templates.

Hopefully this saves you a bunch of time so you can make an even better application this weekend.

More detailed documentation is available on our knowledge base.

Good luck with Node Knockout!

Today is a big day: PostageApp is turning a year old!

Exactly one year ago, PostageApp shed its beta status and officially became a product. In the space of a year, we’ve sent a ton of emails, expanded our plugin library, created content on our blog relevant to anyone sending email, and re-built our sending engine from the ground up (Yes, it’s just about ready to leave beta!)

We’d like to thank our customers who have worked with us for the past year and have given us their valuable input and feedback in order to make PostageApp better – it has been an incredible year and we couldn’t keep improving and building on PostageApp without you.

In addition, I’d like to recognize our super hard working team who have built an amazing app that many, many people are in love with, and whom are constantly working hard to make it even better. The team behind PostageApp is tremendous, and I am more than lucky to be able to watch them work their magic.

As such, be on the lookout for more news from PostageApp, we’ve only been at this for a year and we are just getting warmed up. We’re extremely passionate about improving the email sending process, and we’ll be working on our technology and management tools to make your life better.

Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to go eat some delicious, delicious birthday cake.

You’re too busy creating awesome apps.

The situation: A user has just signed up for your web app. In turn, your web app sends them a welcome email, creating your first off-site engagement with your new user. Oh, but you were too busy working on your incredible web app that you didn’t spend enough time on the welcome email. That’s no good.

Your email has to leave a lasting impression so they will want to come back! Poorly written and designed emails need not apply.

What do the experts say?

We reached out to Erin Bury, Community Manager for Sprouter; Andrew Peek, one of the Co-Founders of Rocketr; and Cliff Peskin, Co-President at BuzzBuzzHome and asked them what tips they would have for creating welcome emails, and here are the great answers that we got back:

1) The subject line is usually the single most critical component.

The average person’s email inbox can be filled to the brim with different types of emails. They can be emails from family, friends, social networking sites, or even from their favourite deal-a-day site. If you want your emails to stick out and actually be read, you will need to capture their attention with a descriptive and concise subject line, which increases the chance of having that email read.

Here are a few great examples:

Sprouter: [Sprouter] Thanks! Let us know how we can help.
Rocketr: Your Rocketr Account is Ready!
Twitter: Confirm your Twitter account, JonLim!
Quora: Quora Account Confirmation

2) Ask what you can do for them, not what they can do for you.

A welcome email is a great way to leave a long-lasting impression with your users and set the tone for what they should expect from you and your web app. Find out what pain points your users are trying to solve by signing up for your web app, giving you a better idea of which features and offerings you should better highlight for others who may share their pain.

3) Respond to everyone.

With an engaging welcome email, you will get a lot of responses, and you should respond to every single person. The whole point of opening up a dialogue is so you can actually talk to your users – they know a welcome email is automatic, so they are waiting to see if there’s actually someone who will reply to their message.

4) Keep track of the responses.

If someone requests an additional feature, or gives you some positive (or negative) feedback in their response, be sure to keep track of it! You want to be able to go back and update those users as you make changes or if you wish to address their feedback.

The Welcome Email Cheat Sheet

1) Minimal Copy

Be concise and brief with copy for your emails in order to get users to actually read the emails, as well as give them all of the information that they should know.

The more that a user can gain with a quick skim of your emails, the greater value your email (and future emails!) will have to them.

2) Use a Real Email Address

When a user sees that your email is “noreply@email.com”, you are probably losing an opportunity to engage and interact with your users because it seems so uninviting. You are essentially saying “Hey, don’t talk to me here”, but it has to be the easiest way to give you feedback about what they have just read and/or any additional comments they may want to make.

I suggest you use a personal email, such as the email of your Community Manager, or an alias such as “hello@email.com” that goes to everyone who wants to hear feedback and answer questions.

3) Confirmation Links

Confirmation links are useful for making sure that a user actually meant to sign up for your web app.

Many web apps currently have confirmation links that expire after a certain amount of time has elapsed, but this is an extra amount of programming logic (on the web app side) that is not necessary and is lower priority than many other facets of your web app. This is a nice to have option, but definitely not necessary.

4) Call to Action

Your welcome email should have a distinct call to action that will drive more engagement with your web app without having to be logged in. After all, what is the point of sending an email to a user if there isn’t something you want them to do?

Here are a few example calls to action:

• Try out feature xyz
• Create your first ‘foo’
• Invite a friend
• Send feedback about the web app

Okay, what next?

At this point, you should have a better idea of what makes a welcome email useful to the recipient, and people will want to read it! Now apply your knowledge and make your web app’s welcome emails as awesome as you possibly can.

Good luck!

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Have your own tips for confirmation / welcome emails? Leave them in the comments or send them into jon@postageapp.com, and I will update our post with them!

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Another day, another plugin for PostageApp!

Today, we are releasing a module for Node.JS that makes it super easy to send emails through PostageApp. Take a look at our PostageApp Node.JS Module page on GitHub, read up on usage, give it a go, and let us know what you think.

As usual, we would love for more plugins on different languages and frameworks, so take a look at our plugins page and let us know if you can contribute!