If you are using the SocketLabs Email On-Demand API, there is a change coming that may affect you. This change only applies to the messagesProcessed method of the SocketLabs Email On-Demand API. If you are not using the messagesProcessed method, then this change will not affect you.

Currently the messagesProcessed method of the SocketLabs Email On-Demand API returns both successfully delivered and failed email message events. This is redundant, as another method, messagesFailed, already returns events for failed messages. Since we store data in the manner similar to the way that it is returned by the API, this is causing duplication of data on our servers. By removing the duplicated data, we can reduce the resource usage on the API servers and increase your API performance.

Effective February 10th, 2011, the messagesProcessed method should no longer be used to retrieve events for failed messages. If you are using the messagesProcessed method to retrieve failed message event data, you should change your code to retrieve this data from the messagesFailed method instead.

If you would like to view the updated API documentation it can be found here:

http://www.socketlabs.com/od/api

Laura at Word to the Wise has posted an excellent article on how to keep your mail out of the bulk folder.

In it she also references another great article:

10 Things you can do if your email campaign is going to the junk folder

At SocketLabs, we put all the technology and management in place to help our customers achieve the highest deliverability possible. But there are also some factors that are outside of our control – like the message content – for example.

Both of the above mentioned articles offer excellent advice if you are finding that your mail lands in the SPAM folder despite having all the correct technology on your side.

Corrected Charges for Suppressed Messages

You may be aware of our suppression system which blocks email delivery to addresses which are invalid or which have previously complained about your mailing. ISPs penalize you for attempting delivery to invalid addresses or addresses which have complained about your mailings, so the SocketLabs Email On-Demand suppression system is a safeguard we put in place, designed to give you the best deliverability possible.

Although it has always been our policy to charge for all messages sent to our servers (including messages we suppress) some of our billing systems were not fully updated, and because of that, suppressed messages may not have been charged properly to all SocketLabs Email On-Demand accounts. With the new update we are rolling out on January 13th, this will be corrected, and suppressed messages will be included in your message usage counts for the current billing period, going forward.

Reduced Charges for Bandwidth

SocketLabs Email On-Demand customers are now afforded a generous 128K average message size. In the past, we allowed 128K average bandwidth per message. The difference between average messages size and average bandwidth per message may seem subtle, but the new switch to base charges on messages size can represent a dramatic savings for our customers. Under the old method of charging for bandwidth, we had to charge for all bytes in and out. That meant that a 64K message would count as at least 128K, since it had to come into our servers AND go out of our servers. In addition to that, there is always overhead related to the network protocols which adds a bit more bandwidth. With the switch to billing based on message size, you get a full 128K per message.

Can I Send Messages Larger than 128K?

Yes, because we calculate your usage by averaging the total of all of your messages. For example, if you subscribe to a plan that includes 10,000 messages, you are given 1,280,000,000 bytes total. (10,000*128K). If your total usage goes over 1,280,000,000 bytes, then we bill you for the overage. Our current overage charge is $10 per gigabyte. By default any one message can be up to 10MB, however you can request a larger message limit by contacting support.