I want to thank all of our customers, partners and fans for a great 2013, and to wish you all a very happy and successful new year!

We accomplished quite a bit in 2013.  I can’t list everything, but I would like to share some of the highlights.  A word of warning first. This is not one of those “funny” blog posts. I am not going to tell you about how many llamas we adopted, or how many pretzel nuggets our developers ate. Well actually our pretzel nugget machine was only designed with a 32 bit counter, which wrapped back to zero after it spit out 4,294,967,295 pretzel nuggets…and we lost track. Sorry.

This was a year for big features in our hosted email services. Early in 2013, we launched an entirely rewritten Control Panel and soon thereafter began to rollout features such as enhanced reporting, with beautiful new charts and graphs. The release of our Notification API now enables our customers to receive real time “webhook” notifications of email events such as when a message is sent, when a message bounces, and when a message is opened or clicked. Our new Injection API is an incredibly rich and powerful way to compose and send email messages with just HTML and JSON. We moved beyond email delivery, with the release of our Inbound API, which can receive email for a customer domain, parse it, and push it as a JSON object to any HTTP endpoint. I know some of this stuff is just a little nerdy, but hey, this is what we do.

In addition to our hosted email services, many new features and updates saw their way into our on-premise platform. Hurricane MTA Server saw multiple releases in 2013 including tons of new features, options and performance improvements. See here and here for more information.  Yes, our high-performance SMTP server, can now also queue and deliver messages via HTTP as well.

SocketLabs saw new growth in 2013. We served more customers, and delivered more email messages than ever. We expanded our footprint in two of our premier data centers to add additional capacity and redundancy. Our staff also grew and this month we are moving our headquarters to a new and bigger location, where we are building our own NOC. As of Feb 1 our new home will be 700 Turner Industrial Way, Suite 100, Aston, PA 19014.

I am proud to say that we continued our tradition of giving back. In 2013 we donated over $58,000 to charitable organizations, mostly dedicated to humanitarian causes at home and abroad.

We are looking forward to a great new year in 2014 and have ambitious plans. So far this year we have already released our brand new Newsletter system into beta. This first release of an email marketing and list management system is just us sticking our toes in the water, but we plan on jumping in all the way over the coming months with lots of improvements and additions already on the way. It is going to be an incredible year! Stay tuned.

Thank you and Happy New Year!

John Alessi, Founder & CEO