Mailgun announces improvements to logs feature to increase visibility into deliverability problems

This was originally announced on July 10, 2017.

Since the launch of Mailgun, our logs feature has become one of the most popular aspects of our platform according to customers because of how valuable it is for troubleshooting delivery issues. Unlike other email service providers that expect you to develop your own retention and search system, we’ve gone to great lengths to engineer a scalable service that allows near real-time visibility into the entire delivery pipeline.

In order to provide further value from our logs feature, today we’re launching several improvements which should help users identify problems faster and provide several new options for troubleshooting content-related issues.

On a sending domain with many events, it’s nearly impossible to page through a set of logs and identify when a problem started. Search can help identify a problem with a single message or group of messages, but it’s not useful in identifying trends such as a sudden increase in the number of temporary failures.

In order to pinpoint negative trends more quickly, we’ve introduced several new elements that help narrow down and identify these types of problems:

• Date / Time Selector – Either based on the histogram or your own analysis, you can now easily filter for specific dates and times to limit the number of events you view. Additionally, you can now sort the results in ascending or descending order.
• Event Histogram – Based on the selected time range, we now provide an event histogram that is generated from hourly counters for each event type. The histogram will help identify sudden changes, such as a spike in temporary failures or changes in sending volume. You can “click and drag” across the histogram or simply click individual spikes to narrow your date/time selection.
• Performance Improvements – We’ve made several behind the scenes improvements to our search infrastructure that allows results to be returned much faster.

While the log messages themselves are often adequate to diagnose a problem like throttling, some users need to go deeper and troubleshoot content-related issues.

As part of this release, we’ve added several new features to help analyze and troubleshoot content-related problems:

• Message Rendering – While we’ve provided access to the raw MIME of a message, users often want to see a fully rendered message to help identify problems with the content itself. Messages can now be safely rendered and displayed as a static image that can be visually inspected on the Message Details page, which is accessible from the log drop-down menu.
• Message Retry – Sometimes messages never make it to the recipient due to a blacklisting or a downstream failure. For these situations, it can be helpful to resend the message to the user (or an alternate user) to ensure that the problem has been resolved and the user receives the message. Applicable messages in a “delivered” or “failed” state can be resent from the log drop down menu.

Both features are available for messages that have been sent within the last three days. After this period, the message expires and is no longer available in our storage system.

If you have any questions or feedback on this new feature, please let us know by creating a ticket for our customer support team within your Mailgun dashboard. For anything else email-related, our email experts are always here to help. Please don’t hesitate to reach out and they’ll be in touch soon to assist.

Author: Josh Odom Josh Odom is President of the CPaaS unit at Sinch. Previously, he acted as Chief Technology Officer of Mailgun, and the Senior Product and Engineering leader at Rackspace. He covers a variety of topics for the blog from incidents and data security to product growth.