Unified Inbox, UI Modernization Efforts, and Maintenance Notifications
We do our best to be customer-focused by listening to our customer feedback and making sure your issues are addressed.
This month, we focused on UI issues that customers reported or we noticed when we were using our service.
Improved Maintenance Notifications
During a major database upgrade in September we noticed our maintenance notification on the website wasn’t always working properly. This resulted in customers seeing an unfriendly error.
From now on, customers will see a friendlier error page or API message when we are down for maintenance. That’s typically rare – once a year on average. We deploy often. Mailsac’s architecture has several load balancers and caches, and redundancies – we avoid stop-the-world events. But sometimes that’s unavoidable, and we hope it won’t be confusing.
Unified Inbox
The navigation bar for the Unified Inbox now works properly under Safari. It should no longer be cut-off (missing pagination buttons) in other browsers while viewing a message.
Starred messages for non-owned inboxes will now appear in the Unified Inbox.
UI Modernization
As noted in previous posts, we are migrating the entire Mailsac user interface to React and Next.js. After all pages are migrated, we will give the styling a facelift.
For now the migration should look seamless – perhaps slightly faster and more solid (thank you static typing and pre-compilation).
The account details page has been converted over to Next.js.
A bug that didn’t allow a customer to remove an invoice email was fixed.
The password reset and account deletion functions were moved to their own pages.
We added many more integration tests to account management features.
Backend upgrades
On a weekly basis we patch, upgrade and improve the many backend systems of Mailsac across several environments. Typically this involves making small change to ansible, terraform, docker, code dependencies, or other infra-as-code. We often migrate portions of the 12+ year old Node.js JavaScript codebase to TypeScript or Go. If we’re luckily, we can delete unnecessary code or remove a dependency.
To run this SaaS smoothly, every day we get onto the software treadmill. We we enjoy running this service immensely, and hope you enjoy using it.