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List Comprehensions
Effective today, Sailthru now supports Python-style list comprehensions in our Zephyr syntax. What’s a list comprehension? Basically, it’s an elegant way to run through a list, filtering out items that don’t match a criteria, and possibly applying a transformation to each item in the list. Why’d we add it, besides the fact that list comprehensions [...]
API HTTP Error Codes
For a while, our API wasn’t as RESTful as it could be. That’s because we didn’t make use of HTTP header codes. Unless the API was truly down, we would always return 200 OK, and use a Sailthru Error Code to denote the exact type of error. After reviewing our existing client libraries to make [...]
Two-Factor SMS Authentication
Protecting your customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) is absolutely vital. We want to give you the tools to keep your data safe. Effective today, we’ve introduced two-factor SMS Authentication which we will be rolling out to sensitive parts of our system. The next time you login, you’ll be prompted to set up an SMS number [...]
A New Engagement Level
Our user engagement levels are one of the best single predictors of who will respond to your emails. While it varies across different userbases, typically the users who are previously active have clicks, opens, and RPM (revenue per thousand emails sent) of at least 5-10 times and often 30 or more times that of dormant [...]
Easy Horizon Tracking
Our Horizon features are really cool, and they’re part of what makes Sailthru unique. You can dynamically learn about individual users’ interests, and personalize every aspect of their emails. Some of our customers (most recently Flavorpill) are using this technology to revolutionize the email newsletter. If you’re reading this, you probably should, too. Up until [...]
Assignment With =
For a long while now, we’ve allowed you to set local variables in your templates and emails with the set() function. Like so: {set(‘myvar’, 42)} Well, set() is fine but it was a little limited, and kind of ugly-looking. One of our clients emailed today and asked how they could loop through an array of [...]
Throttling
We usually send mass email pretty damn fast. And since our most engaged users receive their emails first, that means a lot of activity coming in from the moment you send your email. But some of our customers have occasionally asked us to slow things down a bit. Sometimes you don’t want the traffic spike from [...]
All HTTPS, All The Time
As of this afternoon, the Sailthru admin interface now makes HTTPS mandatory. We’ve supported an HTTPS version of the interface for a while now, but it wasn’t required for all users until today. What’s HTTPS/SSL? It’s a secure data transport layer for websites. Basically, it means that your communications are encrypted, so nobody can eavesdrop [...]
Sailthru and Amazon Simple Email Service
One’s a service provider, one’s infrastructure. What’s the difference?