That's right. Despite rumors of its demise, we don't see email going away anytime soon. Especially in the enterprise and non-profit realms where email is still a critical communication tool. We absolutely see social networks, texting, IM, and technologies yet to be discovered reducing the need for email over time. But is it going away in the near future? No way.

To that end, we are making two critical improvements to our email delivery system:

1) In the next few days we will be deploying an enhanced email monitoring system. We have a fairly lightweight monitor right now but its simply not doing a good enough job telling us the overall health of the email system. Our new system will actively monitor how many emails are sent and if we start to see a delay in email delivery, the system will notify us. Most importantly, we're separating this monitoring system from the remainder of our platform. That way, if there's a systemic problem, the monitor will be unaffected (this may seem obvious but you'd be surprised!)

Here is a screenshot of the system we will be deploying (note: this is what happens when engineers design something. Our UI team would like me to be clear that they had nothing to do with this!)


It may be difficult to see but we'll keep a rolling 30 day snapshot of the overall health of the system. This will help us trend how email delivery is going and spot any issues that are repetitive. 

2) Coming sometime this summer will be another enhancement -- we'll start using Amazon's Simple Email Service for email delivery. When we first built our email system, our needs were small and delivery less critical. So we used our own internal SMTP servers to send email. But as demand has grown, as well as stability needs, we require a more "professional" email delivery system. Amazon's cloud service should provide for greater overall stability and higher email delivery success rates. This will be soft launched in June with a full deployment throughout the summer. 

We're looking forward to getting both of these improvements out the door. We'd love to hear feedback!