Category: Releases

Streamlined Mailsac Updates: Enhancing Email Testing with UI, Performance, and Security Improvements

Jeff P

Get ready for some boring news. At Mailsac, we release a steady stream of updates – week by week, all year long – with no fanfare. We avoid breaking changes wherever possible. Most of our customers have Mailsac integrated deeply into their CI/CD and QA processes. Breaking your build is not cool.

Here’s a recap of improvements we made over the past few months:

  • Updated UI interfaces for managing things like API keys, email addresses, and more. We’re modernizing the main website for security and ease-of-use. Stay tuned for a lot more of this.
  • Additional “Copy text” buttons and cross-browser compatibility improvements.
  • POP3 server fixes to some edge cases around Windows line endings.
  • Over 50 security updates to dependencies which are (hopefully) completely transparent to you.
  • Performance and security upgrades to our underlying servers.

Over time, SaaS services add too many features, getting clunky and slow user interfaces. At Mailsac we’re not beholden to venture capital or shareholders. Customers have our full attention. You pay us for dev and QA tools to help test email. Thus we prioritize speed and singleness of purpose to deliver you those tools. We want to be extremely helpful, yet stay out of your way.

If you’ve ever got issue with Mailsac, paying customers can contact us at [email protected] A human being will reply pretty quickly, getting you unblocked. (For non-paying users, please ask for help at https://forum.mailsac.com )

Logout fixes, new charts, running on the software treadmill

Jeff P

Today’s release of Mailsac’s frontend services includes many fixes.

We tend to release weekly with no downtime and no fanfare. Occasionally we’ll post updates here.

fix: infrequent crash on logout

Most notable is a fix to a UI crash when logging out. In certain situations, you may have seen an error message, even though the logout was successful.

Prettier and more usable charts

We heard your feedback. Usage charts have been aging. Sometimes the styling makes the charts hard to read.

Some additional PostgreSQL optimizations are coming soon. We’ll continue reducing the load time on charts. Thanks for the patience!

Dependency upgrades

For better or worse, modern software stacks have huge numbers of dependencies. Staying ahead of security issues is a daily effort.

At Mailsac we use security scans, Dependabot, and npm audit to stay on top of upgrades. Hundreds of automated tests run to give us confidence that minor and patch semver updates don’t introduce breaking changes.

We subscribe to security mailing lists for our software, such as:

and more!

Removal of Google Analytics Tracking from all Mailsac websites, effective immediately

Michael M

Google Analytics (GA), the ubiquitous web analytics service provided by Google, has been removed from all Mailsac properties. GA is used to see which pages people visit, how frequently users return to a website, and where they were referred from.

Despite Google Analytics being the de facto tracking service on the internet – mostly because it is entirely free – we decided it was not a good fit for our users.

Frequently, disposable email services are used as a way to avoid spam and tracking. But the free GA product by Google is actually an information gathering honeypot, extremely lucrative for them. By some estimates, GA is on 65% of the top 1 million most popular sites on the internet.

It is worth noting that Mailsac does not use Facebook analytics, nor any other 3rd party trackers. We do leverage the privacy-focused – and paid – Cloudflare Analytics, which is included with our DNS and caching service. We also track minimal usage metrics on the server side of Mailsac.com, for billing purposes.

Mailsac was created over 10 years ago with the goal of providing a reliable disposable email platform for software testers. We serve no advertisements, sell no data to 3rd parties. We rely on users to pay us for providing a good service. From the time of Mailsac’s creation – until recently – we did leverage Google Analytics as a tool to understand website load. As a “free” product, GA helped keep costs down and worked well. We have come to understand that “free” meant we effectively shared our users browsing habits with Google, for the purpose of serving ads. So we no longer do that.

Screenshot of mailsac.com on 2022-04-28 in Safari showing zero trackers

Deprecation of Outbound SMTP Service

Michael M

Outbound SMTP service will no longer be supported by Mailsac.

What Does this Mean for Me?

Mail will no longer be able to sent from Mailsac addresses or custom domains using the outbound Mailsac SMTP service.

If you are sending from the REST API, compose email form, or Unified Inbox we encourage you to seek out other SMTP sending services. Mailsac has always supported direct SMTP from anywhere, without a mail relay, as well.

Reasons for the Change

Email delivery is not an easy problem at scale.

Our customers, especially quality assurance teams, are using Mailsac as a receive-only service.

The likelihood that Mailsac’s outbound messages are delivered to the intended inbox has been trending lower over time, despite increased effort.

We made the decision to focus our efforts on improving our core product – disposable inbound email for testing.

Recommended Providers of Outbound SMTP Service


Deprecation of Mail Transfer Agent on mailsac.com Top Level Domain

Michael M

What is changing?

Mailsac will no longer act as a mail transfer agent using the top level domain mail server mailsac.com. That means mail sent to the mail server mailsac.com on port 25 will no longer be accepted.

This change will go into effect on October 9th 2021.

Am I affected?

Almost certainly not. This is a legacy configuration that has not been published or referenced in any communication for several years. Our logs indicate this feature has not been used as far back as logs are stored.

Customers who setup a custom domain are sent instructions to use the mail servers in.mailsac.com and alt.mailsac.com during the initial configuration of their domain.

Instructions on our website for custom domains or the free hosting option instruct customers to use in.mailsac.com and alt.mailsac.com for their MX records. This has been the case for several years.

Why is this being deprecated?

Receiving mail using a mail transfer agent on the top level domain limits our ability to further scale our highly available mail services.

How can I verify I am not affected?

The DNS verification section of the docs can walk you through the process.

For those familiar with MX records, se the command line tool dig or a web based dig tool to verify your MX records are in.mailsac.com and alt.mailsac.com. If your MX records point to mailsac.com you will need to update them to use in.mailsac.com and alt.mailsac.com

dig example

Use the dig comand dig MX <domain_name> to view the MX records for a domain. In the answer section the hostnames in.mailsac.com and alt.mailsac.com should be listed.

Web based dig

The web based dig tool can be used to verify MX records for a domain. The MX records should show in.mailsac.com and alt.mailsac.com

Scheduled Database Maintenance May 22, 2021

Michael M

Our team will be performing database maintenance on Saturday May 22nd, 2021 from 14:00 – 16:00 UTC. During this period, API, email, and website services may be unavailable, intermittent, or slow to respond.

Updates during and on completion of the maintenance will be provided in this blog post.

UPDATE
All maintenance has been completed and the team is standing by monitoring performance. No further impact is expected.

Spring Cleaning with Mailsac API

Michael M

My garden has been planted and the days are getting warmer. Next task, cleaning up. Mailsac won’t help you organize you garage or avoid the accumulation of clutter. But it can help you get rid of old emails.

The Delete All Messages in a Domain Endpoint released on March 23, 2021 can help you keep your private domain storage under the storage limit. It’s useful for deleting all messages before running integration tests.

This post will detail the different methods of bulk message deletion.

Cleanup a Custom Domain

All messages in a custom domain can irrevocably be deleted.

From the Dashboard select Custom Domains → Select Domain to Mange → Advanced tab → Irreversibly Delete Email

The REST API has a commensurate endpoint for deleting all messages in a domain. It can be invoked by calling an HTTP POST https://mailsac.com/api/domains/{domain}/delete-all-domain-mail , where {domain} is the custom domain.

Cleanup a Private Inbox

All messages in a Private Inbox can be deleted from the website or the REST API. Both methods will not delete starred messages.

From the From the Dashboard select Manage Email Addresses → Select Email Address → Purge Inbox

Messages in a Private Inbox can be deleted using the endpoint for deleting messages in a private inbox. The endpoint can be used with the HTTP DELETE method on https://mailsac.com/api/addresses/{email}/messages where {email} is the private email address.

Deleting Individual Messages

Individual messages can be deleted from both private and non-private inboxes.

From the From the Dashboard enter an inbox in the inbox viewer form and select Check The Mail!. From the Inbox, Click the message → Select Delete → Permanently Delete

Individual messages can be deleted using the delete message REST API. The endpoint can be called using an HTTP DELETE with the URL https://mailsac.com/api/addresses/{email}/messages/{messageId} . The {email} parameter is the email address and the {messageId} is identifier for the message to be deleted. The messageId can be found by using the list messages in an inbox REST API endpoint.

Improved SMTP Relay Logs

Michael M

The Recent Activity Log now includes detailed sender and delivery information for outbound email. This empowers customers to diagnose sending issues.

Successful Email Log Entry

The screenshot below shows a successful email delivery sent from [email protected] to [email protected]. The email message id, number of delivery attempts, rejection status, and time stamps are included in the logs

Failed Email Log Entry

The screenshot below shows a failed email delivery from [email protected]. The message id, number of attempts, timestamp, and error message are provided.

This error message indicates that the recipients domain no-where-no-where-no-where.info does not exist.