Who Postmark is
Postmark is an email service built around transactional email, the messages an application sends to one person at a time, and it is part of ActiveCampaign. Its focus is getting those messages to the inbox quickly, and it keeps the full content and events of each message for troubleshooting.
It separates transactional and bulk email into different message streams, so a newsletter never travels with a password reset. That focus suits the account email of a financial product, which is why it is one of the email providers our notifications module connects to.
What it does in your platform
Notifications
Sends the email your customers wait for: receipts, security alerts and statements, on a transactional stream of its own. Campaigns for customers who opted in go on a separate broadcast stream, and deliveries, bounces and spam complaints come back to the module.
How the connection works
One connector in the notifications module talks to Postmark's REST API with a server token. Postmark does not sign its webhooks: they are protected with HTTP basic authentication, whose credentials stay in your platform's secrets, and they come from IP addresses Postmark publishes.
A statement is ready
The module picks the statement template your team edited in the backoffice, in the customer's language.
The transactional stream
The module sends it through Postmark's API on your transactional message stream, from your verified domain.
Postmark delivers it
Postmark hands it to the customer's mail server and keeps the message and its events in its history.
The webhook reports back
A delivery, a bounce or a spam complaint reaches the platform's webhook, behind basic authentication.
Marketing stays apart
Campaigns for customers who opted in go out on a separate broadcast stream, so they never mix with account email.
Support can look back
When a customer says an email never came, your team checks its status in the backoffice, with Postmark's message history behind it.
Next to other providers
Postmark can carry all of your account email with another provider standing by for security alerts, or be that backup itself. Either way, each channel runs on the provider you prefer, with a second one ready for critical messages.
Templates, preferences and delivery history belong to the module, not to Postmark, so a change of provider leaves your apps and your templates as they are.
When Postmark fits best
A strong fit when
- Most of your email is account email: receipts, alerts and statements that customers wait for.
- You want marketing mail kept on its own stream, away from account email.
- Your support team needs to see what was sent and what happened to it.
Also worth a look
- Amazon SES, when your platform already runs on AWS.
- A provider your team already uses: its account becomes a connector too.
How we get you live
The contract
We help you get your Postmark account and contract in place, with the message streams you need.
Your domain and streams
We verify your sending domain with you, with the DNS records for DKIM, and set up a transactional stream and, if you send campaigns, a broadcast stream.
The keys
The server token and the webhook credentials go into your platform's secrets and nowhere else, and no app ever talks to Postmark directly.
A full test run
Every template is sent first with Postmark's test token, which checks the request without delivering anything, then to your team's own inboxes before your first customer email.
