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Posts Tagged ‘api’

New Feature Announcement: Automated Reporting with Webhooks

Monday, February 27th, 2023

The LuxSci team is pleased to announce the release of automated reporting with webhooks to help organizations manage their data workflows. These updates will allow administrators to push information and analytics from their email campaigns into existing dashboards or to email recipients in close to real time. 

“Webhooks give us the ability to receive real-time notifications and events from LuxSci in bulk, which will streamline our internal analysis, reporting, and, therefore, decision-making,” said Katie Ali, Product Manager at Signify Health. 

“Today, our analysis is limited due to the number of resources we have on hand to pull email data. Now that we are implementing webhooks, we can start to automate the analytic process from end to end. Webhooks also eliminate the complexity of a reoccurring polling logic to achieve the same effect.” 

automated reporting webhooks

What are Webhooks?

A webhook is an HTTP request triggered by an event in a source system and sent to a destination system. In other words, webhooks push data to the customer’s website URL for processing.

LuxSci’s webhooks are available for all our API reports, including email sending, delivery status changes, email opens, email clicks, login failures, and unsubscribes.

In addition to traditional webhooks that post data to a URL, LuxSci also allows API reports to be automatically sent via TLS-encrypted email to any email address at a custom frequency. The report data is attached to the email in JSON, CSV, or HTML format. 

Why are LuxSci’s Webhooks Useful? 

Webhooks allow customers to automatically push information about email events via LuxSci’s API as they are happening without pulling from the API. That allows customers to record and review this information and take timely action based on these events. 

LuxSci’s webhooks are incredibly scalable, unlike those of many other providers. Instead of sending one webhook notification to the customer for each event (which could be millions of notifications a day), LuxSci sends a digest of all events that happened over a specified period. By sending a digest instead of individual notifications, it is easier to process the notifications at scale. Batching the notifications reduces the server resources the customer requires to receive and process high volumes of webhooks by a significant amount.

Our webhooks are also resilient to customer webhook processing service failure. LuxSci will automatically retry webhook delivery when customer processing servers are down or failing, so events are less likely to be lost than webhooks provided by other services.

How to Set Up Automated Reporting with Webhooks

Login to your LuxSci account and visit the Report section of the user interface. In the sidebar, select Automated Reports. First, you will need to select the data you want to report. Choose from API reports including:

  • Emails sent
  • Delivery status updates
  • Emails opened
  • Emailed links clicked
  • SMTP login failures
  • Email addresses suppressed or unsubscribed
  • Emails marked as spam

Then select the data source (either SMTP/API or WebMail). The reports can include account-wide events or can be restricted to only certain users. Name the report and how frequently you want to check for new events. Webhooks reporting is configurable to any desired granularity from once every minute to once a day.

Reports will only be sent when there are new events. For example, a report with five-minute intervals checks for new events every five minutes but only sends a report if there are new events.

Finally, choose how the data should be delivered (via a webhook or email with TLS encryption) and in what format for email reports (JSON, HTML, or CSV). Enter an email address to notify if there are errors with the report, and then you can enable it.

Automated reports can be further customized by using parameters. For example, they help limit reporting to specific domains, campaigns, or email headers. Please contact our team today to learn more about how LuxSci’s Automated Reporting can enhance your data workflows. 

New Feature: API Priority Queue

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2022

Maximize efficiency by employing our new email-sending prioritization features. Secure High Volume Email customers utilizing APIs for sending can now set a message priority to determine the order in which messages are sent out.

email api priority queue

What is the API Priority Queue Feature?

This feature allows customers to set a priority on email messages sent via API. Customers can pass an optional parameter in their API to set the message priority on a scale of 0 – 9. Zero is the lowest priority, nine is the highest, and four is the default priority setting.

The API priority queue feature allows customers to send out higher-priority messages faster when the sending queue is already long.

Why is the API Priority Queue Useful?

Traditionally, all customer emails were processed in a “first come, first serve” method. Customers can now use the priority queue to determine the sending order when they simultaneously send transactional and marketing messages via the API.

For example, time-sensitive password resets could be stuck in the queue while a large blast of marketing emails is transmitted. Depending on the size of the email list and server capacity, the password reset email could be held up for several minutes to even hours. This situation is unacceptable for many business use cases.

Customers can designate transactional emails as high-priority with the API priority queue feature enabled. When transactional emails are given a high-priority status, they can jump the line and go out before less time-sensitive emails like marketing messages.

How to Utilize the API Priority Queue

This feature is only available to Secure High Volume Email customers utilizing APIs to send emails. It does not work for SMTP sending. Customers can add the optional parameter and desired value while crafting their API call to send emails. Additionally, customers can use the API configuration editor in the LuxSci UI to change the default priority value for all messages. You can review the details of our API by going to: https://luxsci.com/rest-api.html.

Using Secure Email APIs to Improve Operational Efficiency

Tuesday, May 10th, 2022

APIs are just one tool that organizations can use to streamline operations and automate processes. This article explains how secure email APIs can save time in healthcare communications.

secure email api

What is an API?

API is an acronym that stands for “Application Programming Interface.” APIs enable companies to open up their applications’ data and functionality to external third-party developers, business partners, and internal departments. They allow services and products to communicate and leverage each other’s data and functionality through a documented interface. APIs simplify app development by allowing applications to work together.

APIs help business and IT teams collaborate. One example is the Weather Underground API. If a smartwatch developer wanted to display the weather on the watch face, they could use the Weather Underground API to source current weather data and local forecasts. Application developers do not have to create an entirely new weather database and keep it updated. Instead, the API enables them to use the Weather Underground’s meteorological data in their application.

APIs enable information to flow both ways. The smartwatch can display Weather Underground forecasts, and the API can report data back to the Weather Underground. This functionality enables interoperability and data sharing.

Email APIs

An email API gives applications the ability to send emails and retrieve analytics. Email APIs are often used to send transactional emails from applications like CRMs, EHRs, and other databases. Trigger-based emails are ideal for sending with an email API. In this situation, emails are sent when pre-determined conditions are met. For example, an order confirmation is a transactional, trigger-based email. A person buys a product online, the transaction is processed, and an email is sent to the buyer with their transaction details. The email is sent automatically with an email API.

Benefits of Secure Email APIs

Imagine if it was an employee’s responsibility to create and send every order confirmation email. It would be completely overwhelming. Besides saving time, some of the main benefits of email APIs include:

      • Easy to use and implement
      • Cost savings
      • Email deliverability improvements
      • Email list management
      • Reporting and analytics functionality
      • Personalization and customization
      • Enterprise-grade security

How to Use Secure Email APIs to Improve Operational Efficiency

Healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to improve the patient experience. Online shoppers expect to see those order confirmation emails within a few minutes of finalizing their orders. Healthcare consumers using online communication tools expect the same experience from their healthcare providers. By expediting and personalizing patient communications, APIs can help increase patient satisfaction.

Thanks to the introduction of electronic health records, healthcare organizations have access to more patient data than ever before. Developers can use secure email APIs to send timely, trigger-based emails from EHR platforms.

Some examples of the types of emails that healthcare providers can send using an email API include:

  • Welcome emails
  • Appointment reminders
  • Patient satisfaction surveys
  • Flu shot and vaccine reminders
  • Password resets and other transactional emails

It works like this: the developer creates the email templates in advance and the criteria for email sending. The email is automatically sent when the conditions are met. For example, a developer may trigger a welcome email to send when:

1) a new patient is added to the database and

2) their first appointment date is set.

Email APIs can also pull information from the patient record to personalize the email. The welcome email may include the patient’s name and the date of their first appointment.

Other than updating the patient record, office administrators do not need to take additional actions to send the email. The email API automatically sends customized emails when appropriate.

Security and Privacy Considerations

Of course, developers working with patient data should not ignore HIPAA. It is essential to choose a vendor that understands the requirements. Failing to follow proper protocols can put patient data at risk and lead to data breaches.

For developers looking to create their own HIPAA-compliant APIs, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has put together a helpful guide. LuxSci also has API developer documentation to help integrate applications with our secure email API.

Conclusion

Email APIs are an essential part of digital health transformation and interoperability. Healthcare organizations should explore how APIs can improve their workflows and improve efficiency. LuxSci provides HIPAA-compliant and secure email APIs with Secure High Volume Email Sending. Contact us today to learn more.

Updated API Documentation and New Software Development Kits

Thursday, November 4th, 2021

LuxSci is pleased to announce new updates to our API documentation along with the release of new Software Development Kits (SDKs) for the following programming languages: C#, Python, JAVA, Ruby, and Node.js.

New Software Development Kits

Our new SDKs can be accessed from the links below:

C#

Python

JAVA

Node.js

Ruby

What is an API?

LuxSci’s application programming interface (API) allows account administrators to automate workflows and integrate LuxSci with other applications by writing their own programs or scripts. LuxSci’s API is REST-based and uses JSON for data transport. Our documentation also includes example client-side code that can be used to call LuxSci API endpoints. These simple examples can be used as a basis for building your own API client programs.

Do I have Access to LuxSci’s API?

LuxSci customers are able to access our API upon request. If you are an existing customer, simply ask our support staff to enable your account for access.

 

API Enhancements for DKIM Automation

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020

DKIM, Domain Keys identified Mail, is a critical component to ensuring good INBOX delivery of email messages for day-to-day email, email marketing, and transactional email.  DKIM digitally signs outbound email so that the message recipients can verify that the messages originated from email servers authorized to send email from the sender.  I.e., it helps recipients identify and discard forged and fraudulent email messages while keeping legitimate ones.

API Enhancements for DKIM

In order to use DKIM with LuxSci, customers need to:

  1. Have LuxSci generate keys for each sending domain
  2. Update the DNS settings for each domain to publish the DKIM public key.

See LuxSci’s Help for our general DKIM setup instructions for more details.  These steps are pretty quick and easy, unless you have a large number of domains that you are sending email from.

To help such customers automate their workflow and manage their domains, LuxSci’s API has been augmented to enable management of DKIM keys for LuxSci customers.  The API now permits:

  1. Creation of new DKIM keys for new domains.
  2. Downloading the DKIM information needed for the DNS configuration.
  3. Deletion of DKIM keys for domains no longer in use.

Together with LuxSci’s other API endpoints, LuxSci customers can automate the addition and deletion of domains, email aliases, users, and now DKIM settings.  LuxSci is committed to continually expanding its API capabilities to enable and support automated workflows and processes.