This has all been made possible by the 8,000+ awesome companies that have used our service and by putting together a phenomenal team. In the last few months we went from a team of 5, to a team of 18 and growing (we are hiring).

Our engineering team has adopted an awesome development process to produce higher quality software, with key feedback from companies like Twilio, GetSatisfaction, Gnip, and SimpleGeo. Thanks guys! Meanwhile, our support team keeps rocking, they even help debug code on a Saturday night!

In addition to growing our team and enhancing our systems & processes, we have been expanding our feature set, mostly thanks to some great suggestions from our growing community. Friday was a particularly exciting day for us, just as we broke a milestone of achieving over 20 Million emails processed in a single day, we released the following features:

Tracking Unique Clicks and Opens

Thanks Balihoo for your gentle nudges that helped make sure we rolled this feature out this release cycle!

With this feature, you can track each unique click and open in your emails at the Statistics tab. In addition, the tracking URL’s have been shortened significantly, which makes them more usable in plain text emails.

Blocked Email Addresses

You can thank Gist for staying on top of us for this feature. We appreciate you!

On the Email List tab, in addition to SPAM and bounced email data, you can also view how many emails have been blocked (email addresses that were bounced by the ISP, but not because of a bad email address). Here are a few examples of blocked email messages:

Configurable Email Alert System

Stay on top of your account automatically using the new configurable alerts system. Simply choose what you want to be alerted about, add an email, set the frequency and you’re done. To get started, go to the Accounts tab, then the Alerts sub-tab. You can get further details at the Email Alerts System documentation page.

SPAM Checks on Incoming Emails

We have expanded our Parse API, which allows you to interact with your users via email (e.g. taking uploads, posting to a blog, etc…), to include the ability to check for SPAM. Thanks to a suggestion by PogoPlug, we have also added DKIM verification of emails through the Parse API.

API Enhancements

Our goal is to give you complete programatic control of all our features. We are not there just yet, but we are getting very close. Check out the API section of our documentation to discover what you can currently achieve. Recently we have added the ability to control filter settings, such as the ability to control the click, open and subscription filters.

But thats not all! In the next few weeks, you can expect some great new features and upgrades that we are really excited about. You can also look forward to new blog posts over the next several months that will explore the topic of email deliverability and how you can use SendGrid to simplify the process.

Please don’t hesitate to let us know how we can improve via live chat (or survey) on our home page, by submitting a support ticket or adding an idea and/or voting on an existing idea at our community. Or, just take a moment and add your request to the comments below. We would also appreciate your ideas for what you would like us to discuss here on the blog.

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.

Content test

After some research we found the following on the SpamAssassin’s website:

Versions of the FH_DATE_PAST_20XX rule released with versions of Apache SpamAssassin 3.2.0 thru 3.2.5 will trigger on most mail with a Date header that includes the year 2010 or later.  The rule will add a score of up to 3.6 towards the spam classification of all email.

The default threshold for SpamAssassin to consider an email as SPAM is 5.0.  Unfortunately, it is easy for SpamAssassin to give some messages a score of at least 1.4 so a lot messages were being marked as SPAM.  We have updated our SpamAssassin rules but expect ISPs that rely on SpamAssassin that have not updated their rules to give a lot of false positives.  We encourage systems administrators to update their rules ASAP.

Once we work out some interface issues, we will be releasing the tool shown above to all users so they can also see this data and run tests on-demand.  This will allow users to test their email content before deploying it into production and/or get notifications when an issue occurs.  This is one of the many features and integrations we are working on that will provide better insight on email deliverability to SendGrid’s users.

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.