First of all we would like to apologize for the inconveniences you may have been experiencing the last couple of weeks and we thank you for your patience on this matter. We would also like to thank you for taking the time to report any bugs and send us any suggestions, those are greatly appreciated.
In order to provide the best possible promo service to our customers we recently began a search for a new email server that would allow us to increase our delivery rates and better manage bounced emails. We decided to use a company called Sendgrid. Sendgrid are one of the leading email delivery companies and are used by companies such as Pinterest.
As part of Sengrid’s strategy for increasing email delivery rates, they provide us with email addresses that mail could not be delivered to. We are now storing these email addresses in our system and promos sent to these addresses will not be sent. You will notice this before you send your promos as recipients are marked as ‘Email Error’. If you are certain that the email address of the recipient is in fact active and working, please just send us an email to the support address and we will re-enable their address.
Sendgrid also provided us with guidelines stating that we needed to ‘warm up’ our newly received IP address by reducing the number of emails sent from our server during the first month.
By monitoring the delivery patterns of our users we noticed that people were mainly sending out emails to all of their recipients during the first two days of the week. We therefore decided it was necessary to implement measures to encourage users to send out emails in smaller groups throughout the whole week until our new IP address had become established enough to resume normal use.
We are currently using a queue system, which means that when you send your promos out they are placed in order of when each user sent them, and are sent out at a fixed rate each minute. During peak usage periods (first thing Monday morning usually), you may experience a delay of a few hours in your emails actually being sent out. This delay will also be experienced if you are sending out a large number of accounting statements. This morning this queuing system was temporarily stalled and we have since introduced measures to ensure this does not happen again.
In addition, we also added a restriction stating that if you have large volumes of unsent emails in the queue you will not be able to send more until those emails are sent. This restriction was aimed at users that were sending up to 5000 emails all at once however it was also affecting those that were sending in small batches. We have since reduced this restriction and we apologize for the inconvenience to anyone that was affected.
Finally, in order to implement the Sendgrid API we were force to de-activate the email forwarding system that had been in place. This system forwarded any emails sent to your LABEL_NAME@label-engine.com addresses that were not demos (these were stored as usual). When we re-enabled this system yesterday some of you received a high volume of emails from the entire period this system was inactive – mainly delivery warnings. This was totally unexpected and we are sorry for this disruption.
Any questions or feedback feel free to email us to support(at)label-engine.com
You can also follow us on twitter at @Label_Engine or facebook at facebook.com/labelengine