Major Performance Fix in Postmark's Activity Search

As too many of our customers know, we’ve had an ongoing battle going on with our search functionality in the Postmark Activity pages. With the rapid growth of Postmark compounded with storing more days of “Sent” message activity (we’re now storing 15 days instead of 10 days), we’ve been working hard to refactor our activity search to - well, actually work quickly and consistently, for quite a while.

Our largest senders, and even some of our medium sized senders, have consistently seen time outs when doing a search on their Postmark Activity pages.

This morning we released the newly improved search algorithm, and it’s performing extremely well. Searching our largest accounts takes just a few seconds, which means most accounts respond to search queries almost instantly.

What Changed?

Milan, who’s responsible for all of the improvements, will provide more details on how the search parameters have changed in a future post. For the most part, there are no differences to what you are used to. Just like before, you are able to search for a recipient, as well as the subject of the email. This is very helpful for troubleshooting delivery issues, inactive recipients, etc. Searching your Activity checks for successfully sent emails along with, bounces, spam complaints and SMTP API errors.

Speaking of SMTP API errors, we did include a small change to the way we will be storing these in your accounts. Prior to today, we would store SMTP API Errors indefinitely. These are generated when you use the SMTP endpoint, informing you that we didn’t send your email. The 2 main causes of this are: invalid Sender Signature or you’re trying to email someone that has been marked inactive (due to a hard bounce or spam complaint).

In both of those cases, you don’t need to know about these errors forever. We actually got a lot of requests to remove these from accounts to clean them up. So, from today on, we will be removing SMTP API Errors from the Activity feed after 15 days, just like sent emails. This will help with the UI as well as the search functionality.

Thanks!

We’re really excited about this update because we rely on search just like our customers. Having it reliable is crucial to troubleshooting, which is what we’re here for as a service. We just want to thank our amazing customers for their support while we completed this important fix.

Thanks so much, you are so awesome!