Seb Duggan

I’ve recently taken to using the excellent Postmark to send out all the transactional emails from my web sites. For just 0.15 cents per email, you get the benefits of increased deliverability and a great API to track and manage any undelivered mail.

If you like, you can send your emails simply by using Postmark’s SMTP servers – a really quick way to migrate to their system. But the real power comes when you start using their API. I’m not going to go into detail about how to set this up here, but in short you just have to send your message as a JSON object via HTTP Post.

And this is where threads come in. There are some web services you will use – for instance, payment gateways – where the returned result is critical to the continuation of the page request. But others – as well as Postmark, I also send API requests to MailChimp for mailing list subscriptions – where you really don’t need to know the outcome.