Posts by John Wood

When we built the email messaging channel, we focused on making it incredibly easy to send an email blast to one or more lists of subscribers, or to a segment of those subscribers (like only those who live in Chicago, perhaps). But, one request we kept getting from customers was for the ability to send a one-off email to single email address.

Our customers were continuously finding themselves in a situation where they needed to send an email to a single recipient. Perhaps that recipient joined the list the day after an important blast was sent, and you don’t want them to miss out. Or, perhaps your customer accidentally deleted the email with your 50% off coupon, and they’d … Keep reading

Yesterday was Redbox‘s birthday.

Alright, there is a 364/365 chance I’m wrong about that. But, judging by the size of the gift Netflix just dropped off, you can see how I could make that mistake. “What was the gift?”, you ask? How about tens of thousands of current Netflix customers angry about the price changes they announced yesterday, and looking for a cheaper way to rent DVDs.

In many of the reactions I read online about the price changes, one option was mentioned over and over: Redbox. And why not? Their service is cheap, convenient, and the movie selection is pretty darned good as well. But if you’re new to Redbox, you may not be too … Keep reading

We recently added a new series of reports to the Signal platform whose sole purpose is to make managing multiple accounts (or sub-accounts) easier. This information has always been available elsewhere in the platform. However now you can see all of your accounts, side by side, in the same report.

The new reports can be accessed by clicking the Multi-account option in the Reporting tab. These reports are only enabled for Professional and Enterprise plans.

The new multi-account reports are a great way to see how the subscription lists owned by your accounts are performing. All of the reports will either list the top six accounts or the bottom six accounts, depending on the sort order you specify. In addition … Keep reading

Starting June 30th at 12am CDT, we will be performing some maintenance on the email component of the Signal Platform. We expect the maintenance to last one hour. During this time, the processing of incoming and outgoing emails will be delayed. When the maintenance is complete, all incoming and outing emails that were delayed because of the maintenance will be processed. The non-email components of the site will continue to be operational during the maintenance.… Keep reading

Managing marketing campaigns can be tricky. One minute there’s a small trickle of traffic, the next there can be hundreds of thousands of messages being processed, pages loaded, etc. These bursts in traffic can be difficult to plan for from a technology perspective. No only do we have to ensure that we have enough capacity to handle all quick spikes of traffic, but we also have to make sure that one customer’s large, viral campaign doesn’t squash other customers marketing efforts. Finally, we need to make sure we’re not getting a hosting bill from our hosted infrastructure provider (Rackspace) that looks like we just purchased a F-22 Raptor.

Like many other online service providers, we have embraced “the cloud”. We … Keep reading

Note: This entry has been cross-posted from the personal blog of Signal engineer John Wood.

The past few months we at Signal have been spending a considerable amount of time and effort enhancing the performance of our application for some of our larger customers. It wasn’t that long ago that our largest subscription list was only 80,000 subscribers. We now have many customers with lists topping a millions subscribers, with our largest currently sitting at 8.5 million. That’s quite a jump in size, and not one that can generally be made without making a few tweaks to the application. With this jump, certain areas of our … Keep reading

On Wednesday, December 15th at 2:30am CST, the Signal platform will briefly be unable to process incoming and outgoing SMS messages while we perform some system maintenance. Access to the website and other functionality within the system should not be affected by this maintenance.

We are scheduling 30 minutes for this maintenance, but we only expect the maintenance period to last about 10 minutes.… Keep reading

On Friday, December 10th at 2:30am CST, the Signal platform will be unable to process some requests related to email and SMS subscriptions while we perform related database maintenance. Access to the website and other functionality within the system should not be affected by this maintenance.

We are scheduling 30 minutes for this maintenance, but we only expect the maintenance period to last about 10 minutes.… Keep reading