Things have been quiet on the blog for a few weeks as we’ve been busy getting ready for our public launch. There was so much to do! Today we are releasing 1.0 RC1. Let’s dive right in.

Conversation throttling means no more clogged inboxes

We’ve had good success raising engagement on our beta sites. Sometimes it goes a little too well. Reply to a post with something particularly interesting to say… go to bed… and wake up with dozens if not hundreds of comments in your inbox. Yikes. Sorry about that.

So we’ve fixed that with comment throttling. How it works is simple:

1. If comments on a post start to take off (in the order of 6 or more comments in an hour) we’ll pause subscriptions for everyone involved.
2. Instead of sending the 7th (and 8th, 9th, etc) comment we instead send a heads up email alerting the subscriber that things are getting out of hand so we are pausing their subscription.
3. If and when the subscriber wants to jump back into the conversation they can reply to the pause email. We’ll then send them a summary of everything they missed. They can then reply to add another comment.

Import lists from Mailchimp

Already have your list in Mailchimp and want to move over to Postmatic? Mailchimp importing rounds out our migration tools by joining Mailpoet and Jetpack. Move a list from Mailchimp to Postmatic in just one click.

Just like our MailPoet importer, this one is a bit selective. We’ve built the importer to not allow spammers to abuse your site. Mailchimp users which did not double opt-in can not be imported. Likewise, the importer will not import any lists which are not at least 60 days old. Anyone that falls within either of those categories can be piped over to the invitations system in just one click.

We’ve rolled out an api

We’re working on integrations with other opt-in plugins. To make that easier we’ve created a simple subscribe/unsubscribe api. Developers can now bake in support for Postmatic quite easily. You can find it here.

Postmatic now supports text-only multipart messages

Engaging with WordPress blogs from your old Nokia, Pine, Mutt, or even a Mailstation is now possible. Technology marches on….backwards. And, I must admit, I’ve grown to love Mutt while testing this out.

Not only do we now send all email multipart (which means there is the usual beautiful html email but hiding in there as well is a text-only version) but we do so with exceptional style. We built our own conversion engine (based on markdown) to turn posts and comments into a series of fantastic utf-8 headlines, lists, and otherwise. Things look pretty sharp.

The real reason we now send text-only

As we worked on developing our pricing model earlier this winter we felt strongly that yes, email commenting with replies needs to be available to anyone running WordPress. We want to make a huge contribution to the platform.

That left us trying to figure out how we can have a useful free product but offer incentives to upgrade. Plain text vs HTML mode is one of those. People on the free plan will only send posts and comment notices in plain text mode. A Premium account will be necessary to get full HTML post and comment notifications (among other things, to be announced soon).

We now support single-click unsubscribe

In the footer of all emails sent through the system there is now a link to unsubscribe with a single click. It is sort of nuclear. Clicking that link will unsubscribe the user from everything on your site. It’s the please never email me again button. This gives us full compliance with international spam laws.

It also lays the foundation for a nicer web-based subscription management system. Will be working on that.

Send the full post, or just the excerpt

Some of our users love sending posts out via email but want their subscribers to still visit their site. If you are in that crowd than this feature is for you: There is a new global option which lets you choose what content to send when writing a new post… the full content, or just the excerpt.

There is a trade-off to consider

1. When sending full posts you’ll get higher engagement and better conversations (because people can reply to the post notification to leave a comment).
2. When sending excerpts you’ll get more pageviews but lower comment counts and less engagement.

If you choose to send just the excerpt it will be delivered but the user will be prompted to view the post online instead of replying with a comment.

You can always fine-tune this setting depending on your post content. You’ll find a checkbox in the Postmatic Delivery metabox.

More additions to the invitation system

There are two new groups of people you can send invites to: Comment subscribers, and WordPress users. I’ll explain.

Invite comment subscribers

Some of our beta installs pointed out that Postmatic does a very good job of accumulating users which are subscribed to the conversation on individual posts. Now it’s easy to extend an invite to those people for them to become site subscribers as well. It seems like a great way to give your subscriber list a little shot in the arm every few months.

Invite existing WordPress users, based on role

You can now send invitations to any existing WordPress user based on role. Invite all of your WooCommerce customers. Or Buddypress users. Or folks that have signed up for one reason or another….

A laundry list of tweaks, improvements, and squashed bugs.

I can’t remember everything we’ve done, and I’m a bit busy to fish through the archives, but everything has been improved, polished and rethought in every nook and cranny of Postmatic. We have been developing at a rapid pace and pulling out every stop for our public launch, which will be in just a few days.

Also tied up in all of this is a brand-new website, a user portal for managing all of your API keys and payment information, and tons of demo sites and tutorials. It’s going to be a fantastic summer.

Facilitating better online discussions is at the center of what we are doing with Postmatic. As we participate more and more in conversation on sites which are running our beta it has become clear that while our template is great for new post notifications the comment-notification templates were much too busy and provided more information than was needed.

We have redesigned the comment templates with a focus on who said what, and why. We did a ton of work on improving comment context, reducing the size of the header so scrolling isn’t needed to see what is new, and making it even clearer to just hit reply.

Here is a side-by-side of the new comments template

The new template uses a simple site name as well as favicon (sniffed out by the wonderful grabicon.com) in place of the larger site header image. It also provides a ton of context further down the message in case the comment comes in a few months after the discussion as ended. Down below you’ll see the post title, featured image, excerpt, and then a recap of the conversation up to that point.

The conversation recap is intelligent and does a good job of pinpointing exactly what was being discussed (taking into account parent comments vs inline comments, and its place within the larger flow of things). It was a bear to make but like all of this: very much worth the trouble.

Better subjects for smarter sorting and filtering

Email subjects have gotten smarter. When a user receives a comment notification the subject will clue them in as to if it is a new top-level comment, a reply to a comment by someone else, or a reply to a comment they themselves wrote. This helps Gmail and others group the conversations more intelligently and also provides at-a-glance context of it that particular email is worth opening.

Postmatic gets better every day because of our users.

Most all of these great improvements came to us from a few incredible conversations on two of our beta sites. They were really quite amazing to participate in. It seems that giving people an easy way to discuss your product really gets them talking. The openness and generosity shown to us was really humbling. Thanks again, everyone.

Beta 17 is available in the WordPress repo now. We hope you love it.

Beta 16 is ready for download from your WordPress dashboard.

This release primarily addresses issues with retina images in the new post notification templates. In beta 15 we rolled in support for Thunderbird but inadvertently caused havoc with the mobile views. Very sorry. This new approach should make everything happy. Thanks for your patience.

While we were in there we redid a lot of the code that makes up the new post notification template. We adjusted the header area so it is now possible to create a header image which  fills the entire top area of the email.

Differences in how header images work

The email template will now display your header image differently, depending on what size the image is. There are two modes: Full width and Centered.

Full Width Header Images

It is now possible to fill the entire top area of the email template with an image. It will run across the top of your emails, completely filling the available area. Like this:

To display your image full width just be sure it is greater than 1440px wide. Postmatic will take care of the rest.

Centered Header Images

The centered header images that you have probably been using to this point are still available as well. So long as your header image is less than 1440px wide it will be displayed centered and at retina quality:

There are lots of little template tweaks and changes hiding in this release as well. Next we are on to beta 17 which will be an overhaul and simplification of comment notifications.

Beta 15 is available with another round of small tweaks. The most notable feature is that overly-large images in certain versions of Gmail and Thunderbird have been fixed.

Some words of wisdom on responsive and retina images in Thunderbird

Thunderbird is a popular open-source desktop email client made by Mozilla. We have heard from some users during our beta period that our templates do not render well when using it.

The problem

Thunderbird doesn’t like to pay attention to the width attribute of the img tag. It actually ignores it. Regardless of what image width you declare either via the width attribute or with any css declarations, Thunderbird will render the image at the width of the actual image dimensions. Of all of the email clients we have wrestled with over the last few months, we’ve had the most difficulty with Thunderbird.

We faced blown out containers in Thunderbird during two different scenarios:

1. Most all of our users want to serve a retina-ready header image or logo at the top of their template.
   They know most of their readers will be getting their content on high resolution mobile display and want their brand to look its best. The common way to serve retina images in email is to serve up an image which is double the size it needs to be (1200px) and use the img tag to condense the image down to half its size (600px). Then it looks pretty sharp. But not if the image actually displays as 1200px and either falls off the side of the screen or forces horizontal scrolling….
2. We have to accommodate whatever images get put into the body of a post.
   This is the largest challenge. Part of the value we bring to sending you posts out over email is that you don’t have to change how you publish. Use whatever crazy plugins you want. Throw in galleries, videos, and some enormous images. We’ll take care of making sure it looks great in email. Well… that’s a big challenge.
   We’ve noticed that many of our beta users like to include enormous images in their posts but use responsive techniques to downsize them within their html. The results look great on desktop but are hard to wrangle via email. Keeping these images within a container was tricky.

Our solution

Here is how we won the battle to make overly-large images not blow out their container in Thunderbird.

1. Make sure you have some sort of container element with a declared fixed width or max-width defined as px. Percentages will not work. In our case we use a max-width of 720px.
2. Apply inlined css directly to the img tag: width:auto;max-width:720px;height:auto;display:block;.

It’s the combination of the max-width on the container followed by the max-width of the img that seems to do the trick. No other scenario worked for us. Granted our situation is more complicated than a standard email newsletter template because we have to have a framework in place which will keep any crazy WordPress content in check… but still. It shouldn’t be this hard.

Hopefully the above will help any other developers who are trying to make sure html email looks great in Thunderbird while still being responsive and high resolution for everyone else.

The Beta 15 Changelog

• Fixed more gmail and Thunderbird image problems which caused the template to get blown out. As always, let us know if anything looks funny in your email client.
• Added support for Fastmail links in the footer of emails. Fastmail likes to generate a list of links which were available in the original email when composing a reply. I have no idea why. But now we strip them out. 
• We added some language to the new post notification template which gives a warning about forwarding the email to others. This is pretty important. An email sent to you by Postmatic is for you only. If you forward it to someone else and they reply to the original reply-to address, they will post a comment as if they are you. We now make this even more obvious. In the future we will take more steps to make sure it never happens.
• Removed support for the Jetpack Like This button. Sorry, there was no way to pull it off via email.
• Improved Jetpack Share button support.
• A new top secret feature: to subscribe to the comments on a post you don’t need to actually write ‘subscribe’. Just reply with a blank email. This will be popular for quickly subscribing to the comment stream of a new post.
• Fixed a bug in which the inviter would mistakingly send duplicate invitations in rare situations.
• We now cache subscribers less agressively. This will avoid the problem of a user unsubscribing but still receiving a new post that is published right around the same time…

Many little improvements showed up today with the release of beta 14.

A fully translated experience

Since launching our beta program we’ve noticed that we are pretty popular in Europe. Go figure. Maybe there is a deeper appreciation of the written word? Or a preference for the slower pace of email? We’re not yet sure…. but as of today all plugin functions, templates, and emails are fully translated into three major European languages: French, Spanish, and German. That should keep Europe and large parts of South and Central America nicely covered. We’re moving forward on Chinese next. If you’d like to see Postmatic in your language please let us know…. or even volunteer to help out.

Shout out to Languages by Laura (an early beta tester) for extraordinary translations at a very fair price.

Lending a hand for fighting spam

As we’ve mentioned in the past, we think a lot about spam. Daily. In every line of code we write. And try as we may we just can’t agree with the popular notion that WordPress has a spam problem. It doesn’t. But what it does have is a user-education problem.

There are so many very well built tools to stop spam. But the nature of things is that the landscape is ever changing. A plugin that worked well in 2013 might have been defeated by 2014. We’re happy to keep an eye on that and make anti-spam recommendations both on our support site and now directly within wp-admin.

Our current recommended setup involves a front-end as well as back-end approach. The front-end intercepts bots using javascript so comments never even get submitted, and the back-end uses crowdsourced knowledge to intercept comments that may be porky.

From our support article on the subject:

1. Install Goodbye Captcha or WP-SpamShield. These plugins make it quite difficult for spambots to even submit a spammy comment on your site. They are fantastic.
2. Use a spam filtering service such as Akismet or CleanTalk.
   Akismet comes bundled with every WordPress install and is free to use for non-commericial use. In our 10 years of WordPress experience it has proven time and again to do an extremely good job of marking suspect comments as spam. And it keeps getting better every year. If a comment does get by WordPress Zero Spam then Akismet should take care of it pretty handily. If you use it please do consider making a donation.

Starting with beta 14, if we detect that you are not running both a front-end and back-end spam solution, we’ll throw a notice on the top of the Postmatic Settings screen and provide handy links to get up and running. Done.

The title of the post links to the post url on new post notifications.

It’s a little bit of an easter egg but what it means is that if you get the email and want to view the post online without scrolling to the bottom… you can now do so.

We made our support for embeds even better

In beta 12 we introduced support for the oembed standard. This was a good start. An embed would intelligently be replaced by a placeholder showing a video, audio, or document icon which, when clicked, would bring the user to the online version of the post. But what if clicking that YouTube placeholder image actually brought you to the video? Or if you were on your phone, how about it launches the YouTube app and starts playing the video? Now they do.. and the same is true for Vimeo, Soundcloud, Blip, or any other embedded content. It’s pretty fantastic on mobile.

We now support the wp-gist plugin.

This one is kind of geeky but we needed to make it work. We were delighted back in November when Tom McFarlin announced he was going to switch to Postmatic to power his post notifications and email commenting. Tom is a well known and highly respected WordPress developer. Someday I’ll write a full post about all of the lessons we’ve learned by powering his site and technology stack (it involves a lot of ssl battles and wp-cron wrangling).

This time around we wanted to do something simple to support Tom. We noticed he frequently offers code samples in his posts.. which he powers with the wp-gist plugin. Since we strip shortcodes out by default, these nice samples were not visible in the email versions of his posts. We cooked up support for wp-gist in beta 14 and are happy to have his wonderful snippets land in our inboxes every morning. Thanks, Tom!

If you have a favorite shortcode you would like to have supported in Postmatic please let us know.

A few small changes

• We added support to invite existing WordPress users to become subscribers. If you have legacy users and would like to invite them to subscribe to post notifications you can now do so.
• Users can now subscribe to all site comments directly from their profile page. This is especially handy for folks using Postmatic to power a community discussion site.

Why do you think Postmatic is so popular in Europe? Any theories?