Making your emails faster and more secure

Last week we made a couple of changes that make your PlanningAlerts emails more responsive and a bit more secure. They’re great examples of the kind of improvements we’d usually struggle to find to the time for, were it not for our maintenance-focussed start to the year.

Screenshot of email confirmation page from PlanningAlerts

We ask you to confirm your email in PlanningAlerts

When you sign up for an alert or create a comment on PlanningAlerts we send you a confirmation email to make sure it’s really you signing up or commenting. No one likes waiting around for a confirmation email so it’s important we send these really quickly.

While we were helping someone with an unrelated PlanningAlerts question we noticed that email confirmations were taking up to 2 minutes to be sent. That’s not very snappy!

The problem was that we’ve now got so many people signed up to email alerts that these confirmation emails could sometimes get stuck waiting behind those regular alert emails. We’ve now created a dedicated queue for confirmation emails so they arrive quick-smart.

Screenshot of broken padlock in Gmail

This is what PlanningAlerts emails in Gmail used to look like

Last year Gmail introduced a scary looking red broken padlock symbol to indicate if a message you’ve received was encrypted in transit or not. We’ve now switched on opportunistic encryption with our email service, Cuttlefish, so that all messages from our services like PlanningAlerts are protected in transit.

This means that if anyone is snooping on the traffic between us and your email provider they won’t be able to read the content of the messages we’re sending you. Plus there’s no more scary broken padlock symbol in Gmail.

Emailtastic.

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