New API and Other Great New Features

This past week we released some brand new Socketlabs On-Demand features and functionality that we think our customers are going to love.  We have a brand-new email API which we call our Notification API.  The new Notification API delivers real-time event tracking notifications (messages sent, failed, etc…) via HTTP POST requests to your application.  In addition we’ve added the ability to automatically add a BCC address to each message you deliver through Socketlabs On-Demand that can be used for both tracking and archiving purposes. We have also added a new Deliver From Whitelist feature that enables customers to place a restriction on what from addresses or domains can relay email through their server.

Notification API

We are excited to unveil the new Socketlabs On-Demand Notification API!  Through your On-Demand control panel you can subscribe to receiving real-time event notifications via an HTTP POST request that can be consumed by your own applications.  These delivery events include all sent, bounced/failed and feedback loops (complaints).  The Notification API makes it really easy to receive real-time notification of these events, written in any language, on any platform, in any location, without the need to write traditional plugins or parse a queried response. SocketLabs recommends the use of the new Notification API over the Reporting API whenever possible, as the receipt of real-time notifications for every event is much more efficient than after-the-fact queries against our system via the Reporting API.

Customers can immediately subscribe to receiving these new events through their Socketlabs On-Demand control panel by opening the For Developers menu and clicking on “Configure Notification API” after viewing your server.  Go here for the full documentation on the Notification API.

Automatically BCC

Socketlabs On-Demand now gives you the ability to set up one or many Auto-BCC addresses within the control panel of your server that will automatically deliver a copy of every message injected to the specified address or list.  The Auto-BCC feature makes it easy to create an archive of email messages without having to hardcode a BCC address in each email message generated by your applications.  See our support knowledgebase for additional information on the setup and use of this feature.

Deliver From Whitelist

This is a great new security feature that can restrict your Socketlabs On-Demand server to sending email from only specified email addresses or domains.  This feature could be very important to protect your server from sending nefarious email that comes from bots or other malware that may send spam through your server.  All email coming from addresses or domains not matching an entry on the whitelist will be rejected at the SMTP protocol level with a “554 5.1.0 The Sender’s Address Was Not Allowed” error.  The Deliver From Whitelist feature can be configured through the Configuration menu’s “Manage Deliver From Whitelist” option.  For more details on Deliver From Whitelist refer to our knowledgebase article that discusses the specifics in more detail.

At SocketLabs we are continually looking to expand our service to best serve the needs of our customers and the marketplace.  Stay tuned!  We have great new functionality coming over the next couple of months.