Dada Mail v11.11.x is packed with new features. In this blog post, we’re going to look at the enhancements to scheduled mailings.

Scheduled Mailings allows you to author a mass mailing to be sent out at a later date – either as a one-time mass mailing, or a mass mailing that’s repeated on a ongoing schedule.

There’s a few ways you can create a scheduled mass mailing, including turning any draft message into a scheduled mass mailing. When your authoring your draft message, look for the button on the top of the screen labeled, Save as: Schedule.

You can also create a Schedule Mailing from anew. Under, Mass Mailing All Drafts/Stationery/Schedules, click on the tab labeled, Schedules, then click on the button labeled, + New Schedule,

Whichever way you create a scheduled mailing, the scheduled mailing authoring screen looks a lot like the screen to create and then send a draft message, except for the additional options above:

In this blog post, we’re going to talk about the last three (new!) options and what they do.

Test Mode: only send a schedule mailing to test recipients

Dada Mail already allows you to test a scheduled message – just click the button on top labeled, Send Test,

A test mass mailing message will be sent out immediately.

This new option, when enabled, does something a little different. Instead of sending a test message right away, the scheduled mailing will only go to test recipients when the schedule itself is set to go out, thereby allowing you to make sure the scheduling is working, and not just test to see if a message can be sent out/looks good in your mail reader.

So, if you’re schedule is set to be sent next Wednesday, that’s when your test recipients – and not your mailing list subscribers, will receive the scheduled mailing. This can be useful to make sure that (for example), your recurring schedule is firing off correctly. One reason a schedule is not being fired off correctly is if the cronjob for Dada Mail has not been set, and that’s the first thing I would do when debugging a problem like this.

Test recipients can be set in the authoring screen. Click the, Options tab, then the, Testing tab. Dada Mail should give you the option to either list addresses you would like send a test message, or to use the Testers sublist, the latter of which can be reused for multiple drafts/schedules.

Curious about the different ways to send a test message? See our blog post about Test recipients: New in v11.5.0: Send Test Mass Mailings to Multiple Recipients.

Send email notification to List Owner when the scheduled mailing goes out

When enabled, this option tells Dada Mail to send a notification email directly to the email stating, “Hey! That scheduled mass mailing you set up? It’s sending!“. This can help confirm that everything is running properly. Here’s what that email looks like,

Send email notification to List Owner if a problem occurs

Just like the, “success” email notification, this option will send out an email notification if a scheduled mass mailing didn’t send out correctly. Hopefully, that email notification will also give clues as to why things didn’t get sent out. Here’s one example:

In this example, it’s the URL we’ve set to fetch the content of the HTML message (https://sdafkljsdflkjadsflkjasdlfkjalsdkfjlasdkjflkfdsj.com). It seems Dada Mail is having trouble fetching it (surprising, for sure!).

URLs in scheduled mass mailings can be useful, as the content fetched from the URL can change/be dynamic, so every time you send say, a recurring mass mailing, your message will also be unique. To build on that, Dada Mail can also send out a message based on an RSS feed, and also only if the content differs from the last message sent in the schedule.

See our blog post: Use Dada Mail to create a mass mailing from a blog feed, then send it on a recurring schedule, to see a walk through on how this works.

So that’s some of the new features found for scheduled mailings. In future blog posts, we’ll go over some other features that make their debut in v11.11.x of Dada Mail.

Howdy everyone. We’ve refreshed the forum software used at https://forum.dadamailproject.com to help the community ask, and answer questions about Dada Mail. Enjoy!

Introduction

The Tracker plugin is a powerful tool that helps you understand how many opens, clickthroughs, unsubscribes, bounces, etc are happening, per mass mailing you send out.

There’s ways to broaden its capabilities, which is the topic of this post.

Can you use a third party email layout with Dada Mail? Absolutely! So long as you have HTML for Dada Mail to send, it’ll send it!

In this walk through, I’ll be using a template created by stripo.email (no affiliation). Stripo allows you to export the HTML for your email message – look for the, Export button,

then choose, HTML

Once you have the HTML, you’ll want to open it up in a Text Editor, and replace the unsubscribe link, with what Dada Mail uses. Here’s the template tag that Dada Mail uses as a placeholder for its unsubscribe link:

<!-- tmpl_var list_unsubscribe_link -->

In my template, I found the link for, “Unsubscribe” and placed this tag in the, href="" parameter.

Log into your list control panel, and create a new draft message.

Under the, HTML Version tab, paste the source of your message into the source of the Rich Text Editor – (click the, Source button to reveal the source!)

Since this email message is fully-formed, it doesn’t need a layout of its own. Click the, Layout tab and select: Don’t Use a Layout

Almost done! Preview the message by clicking the, Preview button and make sure everything looks good, before sending things out:

Looks good! One thing to double-check is if the, Unsubscribe link is properly set. You’ll know this if the Unsubscribe link shows this when hovered over (don’t click it!)

http://your-domain.com/dada/mail.cgi/t/CONFIRMATION_TOKEN/

Dada Mail will add its own unsubscribe link + text, if it can’t find one in your message. So, if one is added by Dada Mail, it may be because the one you tried to add didn’t work correctly.

And that’s all there is to it!

Some tips:

Make sure css is already inlined. Dada Mail won’t do this for you, when you pick, “Don’t use a layout” in the Layout Options. There’s online inliners to help you (example). Just paste the HTML you’re using in these tools, inline it, copy the results, then paste those results into Dada Mail.

If you’re going to use an outside template/layout often, consider disabling the rich text/WYSIWYG editor. This will speed up pasting in the message itself. In the list control panel, go to: Control Panel Settings: Options. Under:  WYSIWYG Editor Options, Select: Don’t use a WYSIWYG Editor.

Support Forum for Dada Mail are back! We’re going to roll these out slowly (beta!) to see how well they’re working:

http://forum.dadamailproject.com/

The purpose of these forums are for Dada Mail users to help each other in getting the most out of the app. Post away!

With the GDPR finally active, many people have questions about “consent” and how it relates to public mailing list subscriptions. This article is to try to help out those who are confused, and give a little bit of guidance on how you can set up your mailing list correctly to make sure your subscribers have granted their consent when being a part of your mailing list. We’ll highlight some of the tools at your disposal to help build trust with your subscribers when it comes to asking for their consent to use their personal information, like their email address, for your mailing list.

We’re going to use this doc. put out by the UK’s ICO as the basis for this article:

• Guide to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): Lawful basis for processing: Consent

Closed-Loop Opt-In Subscription

This is what the subscription confirmation button looks like embedded in an email message when it’s received by a user.

Collecting Additional Consent

I would like to subscribe to [YOUR MAILING LIST NAME] to receive updates from [YOUR ORGANIZATION’S NAME] by email about [A SPECIFIC TOPIC]

When a user requests a subscription for your mailing list, the request will be recorded, along with exactly which List Consents the user has agreed to.

How Should You Construct A List Consent?

Will I Need Additional List Consents?

Are you doing anything else with the information you’re collecting? If so, yes! You will have to explicitly ask your user to grant you that consent. Remember to list why your want the data, and what you will do with it, as well as any third-party involved with the user of the data. There’s a good chance that all you’re using a mailing list’s data for is (get ready) for the mailing list, which makes your life easy.

This goes the other way, too. Did you NOT ask for explicit consent to use a person’s information in a specific way?! Then guess what, you can’t use it in a way they haven’t given their consent to. That’s it! That’s the whole idea around this mechanism of asking for a user’s consent on the use of their data.

Stick with your end of the bargain! This is a dead-easy way to gain the trust of your users. This trust is critical in developing a positive relationship with your users!

Revoking Consent As a User

More Information

• GDPR Guide

10.5.0 Beta 1 is out! Give it a try, and give back and feedback you may have:

Download and Install (Pro Dada version is available, too)

http://dadamailproject.com/support/documentation-10_5_0-beta1/install_dada_mail.pod.html

Changes:

http://dadamailproject.com/support/documentation-10_5_0-beta1/changes_10_x.pod.html#Beta

Rich Filemanager Support

Dada Mail has come shipped with multiple file managers: KCFinder, and Core5 Filemanger. We’re adding a new filemanager called, Rich Filemanager (https://github.com/servocoder/RichFilemanager) which will be set as the default.

Rich Filemanager is an update of Core 5 Filemanager, which has shown a slowdown of development and is listed as, “deprecated” by its developer.

Rich Filemanager comes with some pretty great features and enhancments over Core 5 Filemanager:

• Drag-and-drop support
• Clipboard feature: copy, cut, paste, clear
• Multiple & chunked uploads support – based on jQuery-File-Upload
• New design of multiple upload window; New upload controls for each previewed file (start, abort, resume, delete, etc.)
• Online text / code editor – based on codeMirror
• Online PDF & OpenOffice documents viewer – based on viewerJS
• Online MS Office documents viewer – based on Google Docs Viewer
• Extended list of previewed file types via ViewerJS

and more.

We are not yet removing support either of the two current file managers, so if you’re happy with them, keep using them!

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.