Easier API Access, New Image Controls—On the Road to YNOT Mail Nova

Not every step toward a new product experience is a dramatic one.

Sometimes it’s a customer asking a good question. Sometimes it’s an everyday process that still involves more back-and-forth than it should. Those things may not produce the flashiest release notes, but solving them is part of building a better YNOT Mail.

We’ve recently released two improvements along those lines. Customers now have much better control over API and SMTP access, and there is a new account setting for customers who would prefer that images from their email campaigns not appear in search results.

Both changes are available in the YNOT Mail experience customers use today. They also reflect some of the thinking behind where we’re going next with YNOT Mail Nova, the all-new experience we’re preparing to bring to more customers.

More on that in a moment.

API access without all the back-and-forth

Until now, customers who needed an API key had to contact us. Once access was approved, we had to create the credential and get it to them.

The process worked, but it was more manual than it needed to be. It also meant passing around a credential that customers should ideally be able to create, name, and control themselves.

That has changed.

YNOT Mail now has separate API and SMTP sections under My Account. Customers with API and SMTP access can create their own named API keys, see which keys remain active, review revoked-key history, and revoke a particular key when it’s no longer needed. The API section also provides the account’s connection details and a link to the YNOT Mail API documentation.

Eligible Pro account owners can also enable API and SMTP access themselves. It isn’t switched on automatically. The account owner makes that choice and confirms it using their YNOT Mail website password.

Some accounts will still need to request access from our support team. Once that access has been approved, however, the account owner can manage their credentials using the same tools. Approval and key management are now separate parts of the process, which makes a lot more sense to us.

A new key is displayed once, at the time it’s created. Customers should copy it and store it somewhere secure because it can’t be viewed again later. If a key needs to be changed, the best approach is to create a new one, update and test the application using it, and then revoke the old key.

The SMTP section places the relevant connection information in the account as well. An active API key is used as the SMTP password, so customers no longer have to hunt through old messages or ask us to resend their connection details.

If you already have a working API or SMTP integration, you don’t need to change anything. Existing credentials were preserved, and the arrival of these new controls does not require customers to rotate keys or reconfigure applications that are already working.

A customer request that became a new account setting

The second improvement started with a fairly specific request.

A customer was using images in email campaigns and didn’t want those images appearing in Google image searches. That seemed like a reasonable thing to give customers some control over, so we added a new Search visibility setting under My Account → Account Info.

The setting is off by default. Customers who want to use it can select Ask search engines not to index newsletter images and save their preference.

When enabled, YNOT Mail applies a search-indexing directive to supported campaign and Image Manager images hosted by us and owned by that account. It applies to supported images already in the account as well as future uploads. For accounts with larger image libraries, the work continues in the background. There’s no need to leave the page open while it finishes.

There is an important distinction here: this setting does not make the images private.

The image URLs continue to work, and the images will still appear in the emails where they’re used. The setting asks search engines not to include them in search results. Search engines decide when to revisit an image and how quickly to act on that request, so existing results may take some time to change. It also can’t control images hosted somewhere other than YNOT Mail.

We wanted to be precise about that because “don’t index this” and “make this private” are two very different things.

A little more about Nova

These two changes aren’t the launch of Nova, and customers don’t have to wait for Nova to use them. But they are part of the same broader direction.

YNOT Mail Nova is the next customer experience we’ve been working toward: a more modern, responsive, and thoughtfully designed way to work in YNOT Mail. We want everyday tasks to feel clearer and more natural, while giving customers more direct control over the parts of their accounts they should be able to manage themselves.

We’re deliberately not showing everything yet. There will be more to say—and more to see—as Nova gets closer to broader availability.

For now, these updates offer a small indication of the direction: fewer unnecessary steps, clearer account controls, and a YNOT Mail experience that feels more considered from the customer’s point of view.

Neither feature completely reinvents email marketing, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. They solve real problems, though. One removes friction from a process that had become too manual. The other responds directly to something a customer wanted to control.

That’s useful progress today, and it moves us another step closer to what’s next.