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Hi friend, 

Welcome to another issue of Postmark’s monthly newsletter, “Happy sending,” in which we bring you industry news, useful tools, and tips for sending great emails—plus the occasional update about our product and what it can do for you.

This month’s edition contains the secret to how we improved the performance of DMARC Digests, cool AI projects led by our customers, DMARC deep-dives, and yet another lizard🦎

Industry news and useful tools

This month’s section is curated by Patrick Graham, who is a Texan in Toronto and works on the Rails applications for both Postmark and DMARC Digests.

Here’s what Patrick recommends that you check out, and why:

Solid Queue is a database-backed queuing backend designed for Rails' ActiveJob. Recently, DMARC Digests transitioned to using Solid Queue for processing background jobs, allowing for the elimination of a Redis store. With Rails 8 planning to make it the default background jobs adapter, it's worth familiarizing yourself with if you're a Rails developer.

Apparently developing a Rails app on Windows isn’t so bad these days? I worked on a side project last year, developing a Rails app on my Windows PC, and had a similar experience to David Heinemeier Hansson’s story.

We substantially improved the performance of DMARC Digests over the past few weeks (if you’re a user, hope you noticed!) with a combination of scaling, SQL query optimization, and additional database indexes. AppSignal combined with Google Cloud’s Query Insights were instrumental for discovering our performance bottlenecks and knowing where to take action.

Words of wisdom from a Postmark customer: Queenie Peng from Receipt-AI.com

In this month’s customer interview we talked to Queenie Peng, maker of Receipt-AI.com.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the work you do?

Before I dive deep into Receipt-AI.com, I want to take you back to the beginning of the journey when we just started the company. Like every other startup founder, we were learning a lot of new things: registering a company, figuring out product-market fit, doing sales during the day and working on the product at night.

Among all these tasks, one problem has stood out to us: Bookkeeping and taxes, filled with terminology and the support is often limited. As a CFO, I had to pick up an accounting software, work on our books, we spent hours watching tutorials, asking our friends for help, and finally got the hang of it. I still remember how steep the learning curve was.

That’s the beginning of Receipt-AI - a receipt management tool that leverages email, SMS and AI. It allows users to take a picture of their receipt, send it via email or text message, and Receipt-AI extracts the information, renames and uploads it to their preferred accounting software, such as Xero or QuickBooks. Instead of spending hours on bookkeeping and expense reports, Receipt-AI simplifies this process and saves 97% of the time.

How has Postmark helped you?

Postmark has been a great addition to the company, handling both marketing and transactional emails very effectively.

How are you using Postmark on your projects today?

Communicating with my customers.

What advice would you give other folks in your role about implementing and managing their email?

Get ahead early and write quality content.

We love to publish our customers’ stories. Would you like to be featured next month? Fill in this quick and yellow form, just like Queenie did, and we’ll make it happen.

Postmark around the web

DMARC & friends

Currently a hot topic in the email world, email authentication via DKIM, SPF, and DMARC can feel complicated and confusing, but it doesn’t have to be! Here’s a roundup of some of our favorite resources that make email authentication more accessible (and dare we say—fun!):

• 🐶 🐱 🐥 What can three adorable animals teach you about authentication? Check out the email authentication video miniseries to find out.

• Tired of trying to read DMARC reports that look like this ^^? Try out DMARC Digests so you can receive weekly reports made for humans, plus in-app dashboards to keep track of all of your domains and who’s using them to send emails. 

• The resource we refer to most often when we need refreshers on DMARC?: This DMARC guide →

• An under-5-minutes explanation of DMARC can also be found in our glossary.

Cool ideas & resources from the community

This month, the Postmark community shared a ton of love on X/Twitter! Here are some highlights:

• Ben Nadel offered a shoutout to our support team for being gracious and helpful. We agree; they’re also amazing humans to work with.

• Rhys, being the social guy he is, was looking for a cheerful email provider to send transactional emails and gave Postmark a 10/10 score for support 💌 Go check out his project, bundle.so launching soon!

• Kori Francis released an Abp module to integrate Postmark and Postmark templates. Check it out in Github here.

• Lee Martin uses Postmark transactional email to create his first official AI project, Gangstaphoto.com for The Free Nationals. It’s really fun.

• Ryan Frahm made us blush with his 3-point love letter to Postmark.

Your creative uses of Postmark inspire us! If you’ve made something with Postmark, please tag us on X/Twitter or reply to this email with the details. You might see your ideas shared in a future edition ✨

Behind the scenes at Postmark

This month, we shared our home office views in a Basecamp message that quickly became the team’s favorite conversation thread. We learned about each other’s daily beverage count (about 2 per desk), musical abilities, plant collections, and cable management. We also got a visit from a new reptile, this time in Grenada!

Until next time, 

Happy sending 💛

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