Demo: Easily Import and Export Subscribers in a Dada Mail Mailing List

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We get asked quite a bit about if it’s possible to import an already existing mailing list into Dada Mail, as well as if it’s possible to export a mailing list out. The answer to both of these questions is a resounding, yes! The above screen cast should demo both of these abilities quite nicely. (Sorry for the cracklin’ mic.!)

Some notes on importing to make things even easier:

If you’re importing a mailing list used for things like public announcements and marketing, you’ll need to make sure that either the mailing list only has already confirmed subscribers (like if you’re moving from a past system, to Dada Mail), or that you’re actually importing the addresses to invite them to your mailing list, rather than subscribing them outright. This is a very importing point when running a public mailing list: only have confirmed subscribers!

Log in with your Dada Mail Root Password. This will give you privileges to do the mass import by default.

If you want to give privileges to someone that logs in with the List Password, change the list settings to allow this:

  • Go to, Mailing List: Options.
  • Check, Allow subscriptions in the List Control Panel, without confirmation
  • Uncheck, Only allow when logged in with the Pro Dada Root Password

Don’t go over import limit set! By default, Dada Mail only allows 5,000 subscribers to be imported at once. This is to prevent the app from trying to chew through too much data at one time, and failing. If you would like raise/eliminate this limitation that can also be done in the List Control Panel:

  • Go to: Membership: Options
  • To remove the limit, uncheck, Limit the number of addresses processed to:
  • To change the limit, select a new value in the popup menu below this option

We do have an older screencast going into more detail on how to import a mailing list into Dada Mail – much of what’s available now is the same, athough the UI has been redesigned since this screen cast has been made:

Add Images To Your Newsletter Messages in Dada Mail

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New to Dada Mail v10.4.0 is the ability to upload images right into the Rich Text Editor you’ll find in the Send a Message screen just by either copying and pasting the image from a graphics program, or just dragging and dropping an image from your computer’s file manger. Check out the above screencast to see how.

These two new methods make things a whole lot easier to add images quickly, without having to use one of the web file manager that are also bundled with Dada Mail. These methods also work in adding documents to your message too – Say you have a PDF document you’d like to upload and link into your message. Just drag and drop the document itself: the file will be uploaded and a link will be automatically created.

Below, we’ll guide you through the individual steps on how to do this yourself, and go into how to work with the other method of uploading/selecting/inserting an image: one of the bundled file manager. All these techniques are available in v10.4.0 – we didn’t remove the file managers, to make you rely on the copy/paste or drag + drop methods, so don’t worry if those are already deeply seated in your own workflows.

Continue reading…

Use Amazon SES with Dada Mail for Inexpensive and Very Effective Email Marketing

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Sending using Amazon SES for huge daily quotas, and fast delivery!

Dada Mail loves Amazon SES! Coupled with Dada Mail, Amazon’s Simple Email Service gives you the horsepower you need, and the deliverability you desire at a price point that rivals any mailing list service, while also keep your freedom to switch to perhaps a better option in the future, without having to move to an entirely new system.

Here’s some things to keep in mind when thinking about using Amazon SES with Dada Mail:

There’s no monthly fee for Amazon SES: it’s pay as you go! This is an enormous amount of flexibility, as it doesn’t bound you to an inflexible monthly service plan. Want to send 5 mass mailing campaigns one month, and NONE the next? You won’t be charged extra for going over your service plan on the first month, and you won’t waste money on not using the service plan, the next.  This is a huge cost saving source, that can be hidden from you when looking at monthly plans.

Amazon SES is very inexpensive: $0.10 per 1,000 individual messages you send. Sending out to a mailing list of $10,000 would cost just one dollar.

Deliverability is awesome, even on shared hosting accounts. Shared hosting accounts are a cheap and easy way to host your own website, and it’s also an easy way to self-host your own copy of Dada Mail. But, sometimes email sending falls a little flat, for two reasons. The first is that you probably have some sort of hourly email limitation between (say) 150 and 750 messages you can send an hour. That may be fine for individual email accounts sending one message to one recipient as a time, but it leaves much to be desired, when you start growing your mailing list from hundreds to thousands of addresses.

Using Amazon SES, you can instead take advantage of SES’s huge daily sending quotas (in the tens of thousands), and fast sending times to really supercharge your mailing list. Even if you have the cheapest Bluehost/cPanel-based shared hosting account, you can expect mass mailing times to be around 10,000 messages an hour. If you have a better upstream connection, Amazon SES will start you at a high limit of, 50,000+ messages that can be theoretically sent out!

If you don’t like, you can switch to a different service, and still use your own Dada Mail as before: Maybe SES isn’t for you? You can switch back to just using your own mail server easily, without having to shop for a new mailing list manager or service. Dada Mail supports sending via your local mail, SMTP, and Amazon SES.

We provide setting up Amazon SES as part of our installation services – visit our installation request page and see all the options we provide.

If you’d like to set up Amazon SES yourself, our documentation for SES provides walkthroughs on setting up Dada Mail to use either the Amazon SES API or SMTP gateway.