We had a chance to speak with Asana's Product Engineer Cliff Chang to learn more about how they use Postmark to run their product.
Postmark is built for companies who rely on email to run their business and Asana is no exception to that.
“Email is absolutely one of the core pillars to the Asana product. Asana is a team communication platform, and email is still the de facto way of communicating on the internet. Some of our users interact with our product almost entirely through sending and receiving emails. If we have email problems, those users effectively get locked out, and both they and their teammates suffer.”
Postmark really impressed us with their focus on transactional emails, instead of just broadcasting.
“Before, we’d have incidents where inbound emails were delayed by up to 12 hours, and this would happen several times a year. Not only that, but there was little visibility into the state of the problem from our provider, so we experienced a lot of uncertainty and angst. So far, Postmark has only had one minor incident where emails were delayed ~30 minutes, and the messaging around it was extremely clear.”
It’s easy to focus on the importance of sending emails. However, for a product like Asana, processing incoming emails into the application is equally important.
“Being able to handle inbound email as a first-class part of email structure was the main thing. Our email transactions are two-way — it is important that people can both receive and send email to us. Postmark really impressed us with their focus on transactional emails, instead of just broadcasting.”
Postmark has a reputation for high quality. Even though there are several good companies, we were convinced by Postmark’s clear documentation and transparent roadmap.
“Postmark has a reputation for high quality. Even though there are several good companies, we were convinced by Postmark’s clear documentation and transparent roadmap. Further, building email infrastructure is really a partnership — we wanted to invest in a platform that would continue to grow along with our needs, not one that was fairly static and falling behind the technology curve.”
“We have a lot of faith that the Postmark team will continue to build out more scaling, functionality, and analytics to make our investment worthwhile, and that the product will remain best-in-class for a long time.”
It’s been several months since Asana migrated traffic to Postmark. We checked in to see how things were going.
“Everything has been great! One of the best things about it so far is how responsive the product has been. We’re right on the edge of what people are doing with email, and the Postmark team has been incredibly responsive at helping us, or even building new functionality to meet our needs. This makes it really feel like Postmark is an extension of our team, instead of some external library we're wrestling with.”
