Vic D’Elfant is a co-founder of MIDDAG, a Dutch internet agency. We recently spoke with him about his experience using email in projects for their clients and internal products, and how Postmark smoothed out email snags for their business.
With their first client projects, MIDDAG sent mail from localhost. This worked fine until they hit a major snag. “We developed one website that sent a tailored email to every user on Mondays. One week we noticed 40,000 emails were stuck in the mailserver's queue. This seriously affected regular email traffic as well as the Monday digest. The number of users for this website exploded in a couple of months' time and this growth made sending through localhost impractical.”
After this early experience, MIDDAG decided to rely on Email Service Providers to handle email for their projects. In 2015 they launched Walvi to help parents and primary schools communicate. “As a communication app, Walvi relies heavily on transactional email, so we decided to use an ESP from day one. We simply choose the cheapest ESP, thinking that an email was just an email... right? Nope.”
“Before we started using Postmark we used three of the other major ESPs in the industry, but unfortunately all of them had their issues, one way or another. With our last provider, one day we started receiving reports that none of our hotmail.com users received our emails for over a week. We had about active 10,000 users at the time. You can imagine the effect this had on our product and business.”
These major delivery issues sent the team at MIDDAG searching for a new email solution. “I knew about Postmark, but thought the cost was a premium we didn’t need. When we had the major delivery issues with our previous provider, we thought of Postmark again and decided to take the plunge. We never really thought about what a missing email actually costs you as a company. When we realized this, it put the cost of Postmark in perspective.”
“Once we updated our code to send through Postmark’s API it was like magic: the issues we had for weeks just vanished the moment we flipped the switch. It was like they never existed.”
MIDDAG is using Postmark for all of their projects now, ranging from sending 1 email per month all the way to 10,000 emails per day. Vic said, “We'll never send email the old-fashion way again. It's not worth the hassle after we experienced the benefits of Postmark. Knowing Postmark has tons of experience and is watching over every email we send is such a relief. We can focus on running our business, instead of worrying about delivery percentages.”
Vic mentioned MIDDAG has also extended Postmark’s API to improve their internal tools and services. “We process delivery bounces and track opens, and feed that information back to our helpdesk and into our application to proactively prompt users to reconfirm or update their email address if necessary.”
