When we were designing our SendGrid platform, we tried to solve most of the existing email problems and make an extensible platform where other companies could add functionality and solve future problems. One of the current problems is taking incoming replies from emails. We noticed many companies sending automated or transactional emails to their users using a From email address in the form of noreply@domain.com. This creates two huge missed opportunities that SendGrid users can now easily take advantage of by using our parse API.

The first missed opportunity is communicating with users.  Companies such as Posterous, Wordpress, Intense Debate, and Facebook have taken advantage of the wide adoption of email to develop great applications.  Wordpress and Posterous allow users to write and publish a blog post by just sending an email.  In the same manner, Facebook and Intense Debate allow users to reply to comments by just replying to an email.

The second missed opportunity is increasing email deliverability.  Webmail email providers such as Yahoo and Gmail automatically add email addresses that users reply to often to their contacts list.  Messages from senders in the contacts list won’t be marked as spam in most cases.  The best way to start is to allow registered users to reply to emails to confirm their email accounts in addition to providing a confirmation link.

So why haven’t companies taken advantage of this in the past?  First, it is difficult to setup the infrastructure to handle this.  It requires setting up email server software, worrying about scalability, and maintenance.  Second, parsing emails correctly can be difficult.  Emails are encoded differently, have multiple parts, languages, etc.  Luckily, SendGrid makes all these pains go away.

Companies using SendGrid can get this functionality in minutes.  SendGrid acts as an email proxy to web applications.   Users just point a domain such as domainmail.com or a subdomain such as mail.domain.com’s MX record to our cluster  mx.sendgrid.net and give us a URL to post parsed emails to.   Any email sent to that domain/subdomain comes to SendGrid, we parse it (including attachements), and post it to a web application.  This allows programmers to develop regular web forms that are exactly the same as if they were taking user input from a web browser.  Companies can give unique email addresses to their users or use the same email address and include an unique identifier in the subject (such as ZenDesk) or in the body.  For more information go here.

If you are a SendGrid user using this feature please let us know so we see what cool applications you have developed.  We would love to feature them in our blog.  Also, we would love if you can provide feedback by taking our survey here.

One of the many things SendGrid does on the backend to determine if a user is having deliverability problems is scan the content through multiple enterprise spam filters multiple times per day for every user.  Some of the filters include Postini, CloudMark, Brightmail, IronPort, Barracuda, Mail Foundry, and SpamAssassin.  These filters are additional filters from our delivery monitory to ISPs such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL.  In the last couple of days we noticed that a lot of legitimate emails were triggering the SpamAssassin filter.  The following shows how our graph looks like: Read the rest of this entry »

Different types of emails vary in interest to users.  Emails such as shipping alerts, forum notifications, and account confirmations are well received by users and hardly generate any complaints since users already expect these emails.  On the other hand, unexpected emails such as certain newsletters, or email invitations from contact imports on sites such as social networks, event planning , or surveys are less likely to be expected by users and more likely to generate complaints.

SendGrid allows companies to tag each of their emails and assign them a category.  After this, SendGrid will track emails sent, clicks, opens, unsubscribes, spam reports, and bounces per category.  Companies using SendGrid will now be able to see what types of emails generate more complaints, higher click-though rates, or what emails generate more interest.  For more information on how to accomplish this and for a video on how easy it is to get started and how the statistics look please go here.