Sendrecurring.com is getting some upgrades!

You may have noticed some minor upgrades over the past weeks such as corrections to wording and description, and better validation on lists of comma separated emails, but BIG changes are on the way.

Around a year ago I posted about how Sendrecurring would do away with logins and instead get by with actions confirmed via email. This led to the currently-in-place system whereby you must click a confirmation link with the creation of each new recurring email. This works, but it has it’s flaws. Chief among them is that it is difficult to manage large numbers of emails as you are constantly bouncing between your inbox and Sendrecurring. Also it can be tedious filling in the same owner email, and timezone information for every email, those things would be better stored long-term… SOOO

Sendrecurring is getting user accounts!

User accounts will begin being rolled out soon. If you read this and would like an account now head on over to the signup page and then proceed to the login page. You will be confronted with a single confirmation email (likely your last one if you make an account) before you can being using it.

What will you find after logging in? A MUCH nicer dashboard for handling all of your emails!

Some improvements to point out:

1. All of your emails are listed out for easy viewing of everything you have running
2. Turn Off and Turn On toggles
3. The Next Send time is clearly visible
4. It’s just so clean!

And the improvements do not stop there, look at how much simpler the email creation form is for you:

 

Improvements here include:

1. No “Owner” email. You are already logged in you don’t need to enter this!
2. No Start Date and End Date or Duration boxes. What? How? Email starting and stopping will be controlled by the Turn Off and Turn On buttons on the manage page, overall much easier to understand and use than all the date selection boxes! New emails will start out Turned On and you can toggle them to your heart’s content from there.
3. A much improved time entry box. There’s still a drop down for time selection if you want it, but the new box also allows you to type out times such as: “3:30 am” “15:00” “12 45” and auto-completes a correct time from there.
4. No limit on specific times. Previously the time dropdown was limited to send only in hourly increments. Well that is gone now. The new type-in time box, coupled with the server improvements allow emails to be sent at any time you want, 5:31 am? Sure. 6:47? Whatever. I expect the majority of emails will still be sent at even or quarterly times, but the option for any time was often requested, so here it is!

These new features will not be replacing the current features… right away. I do plan to phase out the non logged-in email creation with support for updating the emails you do have continuing on for quite some time.

Expect the landing page to have some information about logging in and the new account in the near future.

Also, all this great stuff is still going to be offered for free!

Tell your friends and coworkers!

Thanks,

Conrad Frame

 

There was a 12-hour outage to the mail system of the site today.

Luckily, I was notified by a few users that their emails were no longer going through and that even the confirmation emails were not being sent, in fact, no emails were being sent. I was able to get a hold of Google (who is hosting Sendrecurring) and get the issue resolved

The issue was due to Sendrecurring switching to the high replication datastore recently. The Appengine service gave Sendrecurring the “default” limit of 100 emails per/day after the switch, to be upped back to the regular limit after the first billing cycle (one week). Well, Sendrecurring hit that 100 limit very quickly before users started noticed the problem. The limit is back up to the normal one now.

Sorry for the gap in service.

Send on

Sendrecurring is moving forward after many months on the back-burner! I am excited to be working on it again.

To kick things off I did some changes behind the scenes, sorry, not much to see from outside appearances. I won’t keep it a secret that I am using Google App Engine as the backend for Sendrecurring. A year ago they offered a new feature called the High Replication Datastore, which is a fancy term describing how an app is spread across Google’s servers, which I had not taken the opportunity to upgrade to. I did that this evening! Hooray for security, server safety, and data redundancy!

Secondly, I cleaned up all of the html template files for that front-end of Sendrecurring. I don’t know what I was thinking 1.5 years ago when I hacked them all together, but they were a disorganized mess. Things are more orderly now, and some sense has been established.

Why am I doing these changes to the backend? Well I am preparing for some big changes to the overall application and would like clean plumbing before diving in too deep.

Changes forthcoming, possible features are….. logins, saved contacts, open-rates on emails, attachments and definitely more fine-tuned recurrence options and delivery.

 

Thanks!

Greetings everyone!

An unreliable bug in the timezone code was causing emails to be sent at incorrect times. It got complicated but the gist of it is that the timezone offset for an email was adding or subtracting incorrectly to the actual send time, and other logic was causing the email to still send in the correct 12-hour block, so emails were being sent out correctly OR up to 6 hours off of when they should be. Very unreliable, I believe it has been fixed and have tested with emails of my own.

Emails are  sending at whatever they were set to previously, to take advantage of the new fix:

1. Edit an email
2. Correct the Time field (it WILL show incorrectly the first time, it will not even be the time the email is currently sending at)
3. Save

I also fixed a bug in the Email Retrieval tool on the site. In some cases it was retrieving emails that had been cancelled or otherwise expired and these emails just led to an error page. No good! The Retrieval Tool now correctly only sends you emails that are active.

Please let me know if you find anything that is acting up.

Thanks!

SendRecurring

Hi, my name is Conrad Frame, I am the owner, creator, maintainer, whatever of SendRecurring.com.

I am opening up this blog in the hopes that allows me to connect with more people who are interested in the continued development of SendRecurring.com, and who are also interested in it’s various uses. It has been nine months since the service launched, over 4000 emails have been sent, and I personally use it for reminder lists to myself almost every day. I consider that a success and I want to continue to make the service better.

Previously to this point I did not state my name or even refer to myself in the first person in the written portions of the site that the public can read. I used “we” and “us” as if I was referring to some large team that I was hiding behind. I will no longer do that, this is my project, and I am available now at any time to talk about it, email me at conrad@sendrecurring.com with anything you want to discuss.

I will be looking into a bug or feature tracker, possibly for this wordpress portion of the site, that users can use to give me more feedback so that I can make it better.

Stay in touch!

Conrad Frame