A few weeks ago we released a free API for checking the spamscore of a message. The folks on HackerNews loved it, and it’s been really great to see people find ways to get more value from this API.

Some of our favorite usages have shown up in just the last week!

Spamscore.me

We released our Spam Checking API with an easy and beautiful UI, but it does require that you grab the full email contents including the headers. Simple as this is, it’s work. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just forward an email somewhere, and moments later, get back a nicely formatted report about your email’s spamscore?

That’s exactly what Jim Carter built with spamscore.me. The cool thing about spamscore.me is there’s no interface other than your email client! Just forward any email to go@spamscore.me and get one of these bad boys back.

It’s free (but no less awesome), so please be kind to Jim’s servers. Have other ideas for useful mashups with our spamscore API? Let us know in the comments, or better yet email me once you’ve launched so we can write about it here!

Christmas is saved on Reddit

Our hearts were warmed to find that someone recommended our spamscore checker to a Reddit user whose christmas eCards were being sent to spam. 

Chris was able to jump in and do a quick analysis of the person’s spamscore report, recommending the following to help with the resolution:

• Set your Return-Path header to a domain and address that you control. Then, add an SPF record to that domain with the permitted SMTP servers.
• Do not use your user’s email as the from address. This is spoofing and you can’t control the DKIM or SPF. Instead, use their “From name” but your email address.
• Make sure Reverse DNS is setup for your SMTP server.

While we can’t promise personal spamscore report interpretation for every problem, we’re thrilled to see that this tool is being used to help solve real world problems in people’s applications.

Have you used the spamscore API to successfully track down a problem? Let us know in the comments.

Postmark’s sending infrastructure works to carefully, quickly, and accurately deliver your transactional emails to your customers’ inboxes. The most common problems that occur outside of our configurations are related to content, and our customer service team often works with customers to improve dodgy email content that’s causing emails to land in the spam filter.

Today we’re announcing a new easy and free API to help you score the quality of your outbound (and inbound) emails. This JSON API provides easy and fast programmatic usage of the spam filter tool SpamAssassin.

Simply POST an email’s contents, all headers included, against our API and we’ll return a score. If you want, we can also return a full report in your call.

Not API savvy? No problem! Our landing page for the API provides a fully functional scoring & reporting tool for you without having to ever write a line of code.

Write an API wrapper, Get Free Postmark Credits

This API is silly-simple, but we want to make sure that it’s useful. One way to do that is to make sure that there’s a simple interface to it in everyone’s favorite programming languages & frameworks. 

We’ll give 10,000 free Postmark credits to the first person to write and open source a complete API wrapper for our Spam Score API in a given language/framework. We’ll compile a directory of the wrappers and publish them along with the API.

Our own Oren Mazor (who wrote the API) has provided an example library in Python, if you’re looking for patterns to follow. 

To submit an API wrapper, email a link to your repository to alex@wildbit.com. We’ll provide the free Postmark credits to one winner per language/framework, based on the timestamp of the submission. 

HackerNews Discussion

We “soft” released this on Friday night and there was some great discussion on HackerNews, spending most of the weekend on the home page. Jump over to the comments thread to see what people think!

We just pushed new versions of postmark (v0.9) and postmark-rails (v0.4) gems to Rubygems.org.

The new gems are universal and work perfectly with both Rails 2.3 and Rails 3. If you use the postmark gem without Rails you can now use it with Mail instead of Tmail.

We also added support for attachments in this release. For examples, installation and configuration notes please check the README file.

And in case you missed it, we also updated the developer docs with CakePHP and Node.js libraries.

Huge thanks to Randy Schmidt, David Pitman, Chris Williams, and Daniel McOrmond for the contributions!