I’ll warn you ahead of time, this post was written for programmers. If you’re an Email Center Pro end user, you probably don’t need to look at this. If you’ve never written a line of code in your life, you’re probably better off just skipping this article or handing it off to someone else.

If you’re the brave sort, keep reading.

Here is a screenshot from inside of our Email Center Pro backend. From time to time we may need to contact the person who holds the account for whatever reason- billing issues, to follow up with a phone call, or sometimes just to say “hi”. In its current form, it takes a few clicks to get there. Every time we want to contact an account owner we have to go through the long and arduous task of click, drag, copy, change tab, compose, click “To” field, paste.  Let’s get this down to one click.

All you need to do to is output a link that looks like this:

<a href="http://paloalto.emailcenterpro.com/Client#mailto:emailcenterpro@paloalto.com" target="_blank">emailcenterpro@paloalto.com</a>

(I’ve bolded the parts you’ll need to change.) By adding the #mailto:emailcenterpro@paloalto.com to the link, we tell Email Center Pro that we want to create a new email addressed to emailcenterpro@paloalto.com. We can add a link to this address, dynamically populating the URL part, so that we get something like this:

Clicking that link leads us here:

Wow! One click, and we’re ready to compose an email. We’re already saving time! Not a lot, but every second counts.

Without much more work, you can do some very powerful things. Sometimes we get calls from people who signed up for Email Center Pro but they’ve lost the email they got when they signed up, and they can’t remember the URL or user name that they signed up for/with. We send this sort of email fairly often, so we have a template for it in Email Center Pro. The template explains what URL to go to, tells them the user name they signed up for, and gives them information on how to change their password.

We can look the account up using the user’s email address or company name, but then to actually get the information to the account owner, we have to: copy the email address, change tab, compose, paste the email address, type a subject, load a template, change a few words in the template (username and URL), and finally send. That’s a lot of mouse clicks and keystrokes. How could we speed this up?

First, let’s pick a subject to use. “Your account information” sounds pretty good. To add this to our link, we’ll just add it as a parameter to our URL:

http://paloalto.emailcenterpro.com/Client#mailto:emailcenterpro@paloalto.com?subject=Your account information

I’ve bolded the new part. To be totally correct, we should escape those spaces, but most modern browsers will do this automatically. Plus, it reads better without %20 everywhere.

Now, we’re going to find the ID of the template we use. To do this, open the template for editing, and look in your address bar.

You’ll see something like this:

http://paloalto.emailcenterpro.com/Client#templateId=afd17f09-e615-3e92-48eb-534bc28ca27c

The bolded part is what we’re interested in. It’s the templateId, a globally unique identifier (GUID) that identifies this template. We’ll add this to our URL also:

http://paloalto.emailcenterpro.com/Client#mailto:emailcenterpro@paloalto.com?subject=Your account information&templateId=afd17f09-e615-3e92-48eb-534bc28ca27c

Great! We’re almost there. We don’t have to type the subject or select the template anymore, but we still have to copy and paste the user’s information into the email. This is where our newest feature, Input Fields, come in handy.

Remember what our template looked like?

The rows of underscores are the cue to replace part of the template. We updated the template to use Input Fields, now it looks like this:

See the Input Fields? They look like normal words, but they’re surrounded by {curly braces}. We don’t need to configure these anywhere, just add them in as needed. You can fill these out in the interface, or you can pass in values from the URL like this:

http://paloalto.emailcenterpro.com/Client#mailto:emailcenterpro@paloalto.com?subject=Your account information&templateId=afd17f09-e615-3e92-48eb-534bc28ca27c&name=Evan&subdomain=paloalto&username=admin

Clicking this link will automatically fill in the Input Fields.

Now we can just click “Send” and we’ve managed to shrink a long, multi-step process into just a few clicks. We can easily add this link into our admin panel, automatically pulling the details from our database.

Amazon Web Services are at the core of the Email Center Pro infrastructure. We started out by storing all of the message content using the Simple Storage Service (S3). This provides each of our customers with an infinitely scalable storage area for their emails, attachments, and templates. As a small business, it helps us to sleep better knowing that our users’ data is safely stored in secured, managed data centers, and that we’re able to leverage the reputation and trust that Amazon has built over the last decade-plus of business.

We were so happy with the reliability and cost-benefit of using S3 that the next step was taking our application from traditional managed hosting to a full Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform. We’ve developed a set of instance configurations that can be used to run any of the services that power Email Center Pro in “the cloud.” As a result, we can nearly instantly launch more computing power to balance load in times of peak traffic or mail volume. Another benefit of EC2 is that when we prepare to release updates, we can test them on instances running in an identical configuration to the production environment, parallel to the publicly accessible version of the application, and only when we need to test. For our relational database needs, we have been participating in Elastra’s beta program. They’ve developed a way to run database servers on EC2 using S3 for persistent storage. As a result, we’ve been able to decrease database latency, since the Elastra instances are running within the same network as Email Center Pro application servers. The only component of our application that does not run within the sphere of Amazon Web Services is our mail gateway servers- and it’s just because we need a valid reverse DNS entry in order to avoid blacklisting.

In its early days, EC2 was primarily used to handle batches of asynchronous, processing-intensive tasks, but Amazon has made strides recently with features that have turned it into a true hosting platform. New developments such as static IP addressing and availability zones allow us to provide great uptime to our customers and protect against any single point of failure. And in the event of a true catastrophe, we do maintain traditional on-disk backups and warm database servers to get us back up and running quickly. In the near future, Amazon will be releasing persistent storage volumes for EC2, which will improve our search infrastructure, caching and more. Just today, they released full-blown technical support contracts, making EC2 a truly viable replacement for managed hosting.

When people hear about Amazon Web Services, buzzwords like “scalability” and “reliability” abound– but the proof is in the pudding. Email Center Pro is an example that you really can build an application entirely on the Amazon Web Services platform with great results.

Alex Boone
Senior Software Design Engineer