Summary

Efforts this week were focused on scaling the application to handle multiple file uploads concurrently. This will allow our larger enterprise customers to run sizable email verifications simultaneously, whereas in the past customers would need to be queued up based on the upload time of the list.

We also released the first iteration of our API along with its documentation. This will allow 3rd parties (customers and tools) to integrate ListJoy capabilities into their applications and do individual email verification checks.

In addition, a number of UI enhancements were delivered to the application to provide a better experience for users of Internet Explore and FireFox.

Accomplishments

  • Added additional servers and capacity to the existing infrastructure and set up load balancing to handle increased usage.

  • Optimized Sidekiq job processing to better handle queuing of jobs involving 10,000 email addresses or more. Smaller email jobs are separated into their own queues for a different processing flow, so that they can be handled with a more "immediate" user experience.

  • Completed our monthly static security scan. This identified two low-risk flaws that were able to resolved with an upgrade to our sanitization library

  • Event Triggers have been added across the entire application to provide more concise tracking of user activities in our Analytics environment.

  • An Administration Control Panel was added to the environment. This allows Marketing and Ops to export report data for additional analytic purposes. This specifically allows us to better understand the quality of the email lists we're being asked to verify while anonymizing that data. There are real opportunities here to provide additional Case Study information to the public, or expose these reports in a dashboard to individual customers, so they can compare the quality of their lists with others in their industry!

  • We added a number of Unit Tests and Cypress Tests to the application. Our code coverage is now at 93%.

  • Automated emails have been added to ListJoy. We've integrated this into Twilio Sendgrid to ensure high deliverability. Currently we're sending triggered emails upon verification start (which provides an estimated time), when the verification is complete (providing a link to the completed CSV), and a follow up email to remind them that their verification is complete.

  • The initial beta version of our API has been documented in Swagger and is ready for testing. When called with the appropriate key and an email address attached to it, the API will respond back with the email verification response from the ListJoy servers. Right now this is rate limited to 500 calls per hour, and its test implementation is intended for checking individual emails one at a time. For higher volume customers we'll want to create an appropriate API Usage Limits restrictions (per minute / per hour / per day, by account, etc.)

Bug Fixes & Polish

  • We cleaned up a number of CSS issues that users of Microsoft Edge and Firefox were encountering. We expect this to occur less as Microsoft transitions to a Chrome engine in the near future.

  • We added some sanitization to the CSV file upload process. Several users are converting Excel files that for whatever reason have emojis in their cells. This leads to bad email address data (with symbols, etc.) which is an instant fail in the verification process for those specific rows.

  • Fixed the progress bar on the processing page if the user hit refresh repeatedly.

  • Addressed an issue in the CSV file uploader if the user was using non-standard characters.

  • Updated the mobile responsive design of the dashboard in case users check in on their progress from their mobile device.

Releases / Deployments

  • Version 1.1.2 has been deployed to production

  • Version 1.1.3 is currently on staging, our goal is to deliver this to production next week.

Upcoming & Recommendations

  • We need to determine as a team the best Email Service Provider to perform our first integration with. This will allow customers of a particular service to synchronize their mailing list with ListJoy and keep their lists clean pre-send. Right now we are advocating for MailChimp

  • There's an opportunity for some list quality reports either to be placed in the dashboard post-verification, emailed out to users after a verification, or both. Lets plan on a wire-framing session to better layout what one of these reports would look like.

  • We believe now is the right time to consider upgrading Rails. With test coverage at 91% we feel confident that any issues that would arise from an upgrade of Rails would be caught by automated testing and by the QA team.