So MyBeli needs to send email. Not a lot, just the boring stuff: password reset, “hey your quote is ready”, “hey a new order came in”, that kind of thing. Five templates total, no newsletter, no bulk anything. Figured signing up for Postmark and shipping would take like an afternoon.

lol no.

the review#

Turns out Postmark doesn’t just hand you a working account. You sign up and then a real person emails you back going “cool, but what IS this thing, what are you sending, and where did you get these email addresses.” Which, fair. That last question is really the only question. Every version of it boils down to: are you about to spam people. I get why they ask, half the internet’s inbox problems are exactly this.

Answering honestly was easy enough, we don’t have a mailing list, never did, an email only ever shows up because a shop owner gave it to us directly or a customer typed their own into a form (and even then the field’s optional, idk why you’d need it but some people want a paper trail). But “trust me bro” in a reply email felt weak. Anyone can type that.

so I just… made it a page#

Instead of writing the answer once and having it disappear into an email thread forever, I stuck it on MyBeli’s actual landing page. Little section, two dialogs behind footer links so it’s not in everyone’s face, just says plainly here’s the five emails we send and here’s exactly how we get an address. Then the reply to Postmark was basically “see for yourself: [link]” instead of me just asserting stuff.

Worked better than I expected honestly. A page you can go check yourself just hits different than a paragraph of claims. Also means next time someone asks the same question (support later, an audit, whatever) the answer’s already sitting there instead of me writing the same email again.

Anyway they approved it. 🎉

ok but now what#

Approval isn’t really the finish line though, it’s more like now the actual rules kick in. Postmark’s terms say keep bounce rate under 10% and spam complaints under 0.1%, all the time, not a one-time check you pass and forget. And here’s the thing that got me: at our volume (like, a handful of emails a day per shop) 10% is not the cushion it sounds like. If a shop owner fat-fingers their own notification email in settings, literally every order alert to that address bounces, forever, until someone notices. That’s one typo away from blowing the whole thing. Didn’t love that.

Two things I did about it. First went back and actually tightened the email validation on the forms, because the old regex was basically “does this contain an @ symbol” lol, which let through stuff like a@b. Not great when it’s going straight to Postmark’s API. Second thing, set up DKIM plus a custom Return-Path on the domain instead of relying on one single verified sender address. Bonus of doing it that way: any address on the domain can send without me manually re-verifying a new one every time we onboard another shop. We’re planning to add more shops so that part matters a lot, didn’t want “add a client” to also mean “go click confirm in Postmark’s dashboard again.”

and ImprovMX for the other direction#

Also needed the domain to receive mail, not just send it, since there’s a contact address on the landing page now and presumably a Postmark reviewer might actually reply to something. Setting up real inbound mail hosting for that felt like massive overkill for what’s basically “forward this to my actual inbox.” So it’s just ImprovMX doing forwarding, mail to the domain lands wherever I already check email, no server to babysit. Postmark handles sending out, ImprovMX handles stuff coming in, two small tools instead of one big one trying to do everything.

what I’m not putting here#

No tokens, no DNS records, no copy-pasting the actual reviewer email, obviously. But yeah that’s basically the whole saga: a review that’s really just asking “did anyone consent to this,” answered by making the answer checkable instead of just claimed, and now the ongoing job of not blowing a bounce budget that’s way tighter than it looks at low volume. Onward.