That’s the #1 thing we’ve been asked we’ve received since launching our public beta last week. Although we try to cover a lot of the common questions in our FAQ it admittedly can be a little hard to dig around in. We’re working on that. Until then, here are some of the more common questions with the simplest explanations I can muster:
Where does the mail go? Where does it come from? What’s the flow look like? How do you do it?
We built Postmatic to be compatible with any WordPress install, anywhere, on any host. Even the really junky ones. That meant not relying on the outgoing or incoming mail service provided with the hosts. It’s just not reliable. Plus, you’ll get yourself in trouble if you have a lot of subscribers. There are very good reasons not to send your own email if you are sending in quantity. And once you start using Postmatic, you’ll be sending quite a lot.
So we take care of it. We didn’t want to mess around. We want Postmatic to just work for everyone. All email that leaves your site and has to do with Postmatic (new posts, new comment notifications, subscribe notices, unsubscribe notices, etc) is handled by us and sent through Mailgun.
An average outgoing transaction looks like this:
- You publish a post
- Postmatic packages your post into your template (filters shortcodes, throws the header on top, widgets on the bottom) and sends it up to our servers to be inlined (so it can look its best in as many email clients as possible). It also sends along a list of all of the email addresses the post needs to be mailed to.
- Our server creates a message for every one of your subscribers and hands each off to Mailgun.
- Mailgun delivers it to all the happy inboxes. This all happens very quickly.
And incoming looks like this:
- A subscriber replies to your post to leave you a comment.
- Each email sent by our server has a unique reply-to address assigned to it. If you reply to this post right now you’ll see it.
- That post comes back into Mailgun who in turn hand it off to our server.
- Our server looks at the reply-to address and figures out which site it belongs to, which post it is a comment on, what comment it is in response to, and what subscriber it came from.
- Our server then posts the comment back to your blog via the WordPress api. Sounds like magic, right? It’s not. It’s just a lot of hard work 🙂
Do you handle the outgoing mail for my site? Or does my host?
During our public beta (which will probably be through November) we are handling all outgoing and incoming mail for Postmatic-related email. Nothing goes through your web host. We are doing this because email delivery is notoriously difficult to troubleshoot. If we take most of the acronyms (ISP, DNS, SMTP etc) out of the way doing a large-scale test of our infrastructure becomes much easier. Right now if you visit our support site to tell us your post didn’t get delivered we know exactly who to blame. Us!
Will you always handle all of my Postmatic email?
We will always handle incoming mail coming back to your site. We have to in order to process the comments.
When we launch 1.0 we will no longer offer free outgoing mail service. We really wish we could but the cost would be exorbitant. If you are running a small site or are on a quality host and behaving yourself, you shouldn’t have any problems. If you do have problems we will offer very affordable outgoing mail service as part of a paid upgrade (with lots of other cool features such as analytics and support for post attachments). Once we see how the numbers shake out we’ll come up with the most obtainable price possible.
So you’ll be taking away my currently free beta period outgoing email service?
Not at all. All beta sites will continue to enjoy free outgoing mail for the duration of our time together. It’ll be our way to say thanks for kicking the tires.
Does Postmatic interfere with other email sent from WordPress?
No. We only send and receive email that has to do with Postmatic. Your other plugins continue sending mail using wp_mail.
Do I have to modify my DNS or make other changes to my site setup?
Absolutely not! Does that sound easy and simple? Installation is just a few clickety-clicks away.