If you customized an existing email template and would like to reset back to the new default, click the “Edit Template” button while viewing the email template, then look for a big red “Reset Template” button at the bottom of the page. It is only displayed if you have saved changes to your existing email template.

Invoice Data

The set of template variables available for our email templates has expanded to allow you to embed invoice line items. Every New Subscription, Payment Receipt, and Declined Payment email has invoice data that can now be included in the body of your email. Please see our email customization documentation for more details about the variables. Our new default templates include this data.

Headers and Footers

Previously, all headers and footers were amended to every template. We heard that you may have a different header for one or two emails; the rest will use the same header. So, now you can explicitly include your own custom header if you like, or you can use Recurly’s default header.

Disabling HTML Versions

By default, Recurly will send both the text and HTML versions for every email — the subscriber’s email client will render the HTML version if it can, otherwise it will use the text version. You can now disable the HTML version of an email template easily by unchecking a box. Just uncheck “Include HTML Version” in the email template Settings and you’re done.

To find out more about our email templates, please visit our email customization documentation. Thanks again for all your feedback.

Recently, there’s been a high amount of email support requests. We spool mail locally from our web application to Postfix, then deliver it out to the internet. Well, it turns out that a large amount of that email was getting dropped. Watching the postfix mail logs was a bit disheartening after seeing numerous mail servers refuse to chat with our email server. We have SPF records setup, reverse DNS, and deliver mail from a dedicated IP address — it turns out that that’s still not enough.

To our customers: I’m sorry we didn’t figure this out earlier. We haven’t done a good job delivering our billing emails to your customers. Right now, we are evaluating multiple ways to improve the email delivery rates for the emails we send to your subscribers on your behalf. There should be an immediate uptick in the delivery rate for your emails today. And over the next couple weeks, we’ll determine the best way to reliably deliver your emails with the correct domain keys, SPF records, etc so that they work even better than if you were to send the emails yourself.

To other start-ups: I hope you read this and then realize that running your own SMTP server on dedicated, non cloud-based servers can still be problematic. I thought that because we’re not in the cloud, we don’t need someone else to handle our emails — looks like I was wrong. To remedy the situation, we’re now evaluating SendGrid (shout out to another CEO named Isaac). I’ve heard great things about their service and I’ve been comparing email headers all evening. It looks like their product is doing a fantastic job handling bounced emails, invalid email addresses, ISP feedback loops, domain keys (something we didn’t have setup), SPF, and everything else. Their web UI is a little rough around the edges, but so far it looks promising. Assuming their product lives up to its marketing material, it will help us dramatically improve our email reliability.

We’re not email experts and we don’t have time to build it out ourselves — (this sounds so familiar, right?).

Once again, a big thanks to everyone for being patient as we improve our email issues.

If your users forget about your service during the year and then they see the yearly renewal on their statement, they’re going to remember your service… and not in a good way. Worse yet, they might want their money back. That usually means they’ll ask you for a refund (and you should be willing to issue it if they really haven’t used the service) or they’ll attempt a charge-back (and that sucks for you and your bank account).

So right before the yearly subscription renews, remind your users two weeks ahead of time about the upcoming charge. This gives them plenty of time to opt-out of the subscription. It also gives you a chance to remind them of the value you provide so they will continue paying for the service. It’s just that easy to keep everyone happy and make more money.

And yes, Recurly will be adding this feature before your yearly subscriptions get close to expiration.