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Sep
11
Posted by:
Sebastian Leupold
9/11/2007
 Module Bulkmail, to be found at Newsletter item in Admin menu, has been enhanced to provide new options and enhanced capabilities:
New features in the user interface are a role group selector (useful in portals with a large number of roles) and a new advanced setting "replace Tokens?". Enable this option, to allow personalization anywhere in the body and subject (instead of the current "Dear <Displayname>," that is currently still used, if "replace Tokens" is false). in send mathod "TO", you can use any user, membership or profile property of the addressed user, in any method you can also use portal and date/time properties. To insert a token, place object and property name placed in brackets, like
Dear [user:displayname],
today ist [dateTime:current], we send greetings to [profile:city].
Your team of portal [portal:PortalName]
There are minor difficulties:
- for anonymous users, neither displayname nor city are specified.
- datetime shall display weekday only
to overcome those limitations, TokenReplace allows to specify a format and a value, if property not found, both separated by "|" character. Format can also be used with strings, using {0} as placeholder for the string value itself:
Dear [user:displayname|{0}|User],
today ist [dateTime:current|"dddd"][profile:city|, we send greetings to {0}].
Your team of portal [portal:PortalName]
A more detailed manual will be provided lated, currently there is a list of available tokens in the UDT 3.4.0 manual.
Please note, that the previous send method is still available in current version, if you turn off "TokenReplace" option. In next version, this shall be used to allow suppression of token replacement. Further enhancements will be added to grant access to new options of the called class, like adding multiple attachments.
Other enhancements are added to the send report, that is returned to the sending user by email after completion. It now contains detailed error messages and the list of email addresses, who got the mail.
For developers, who want to include bulkmails into their own modules, there is a new class SendTokenizedBulkMail with an easy to use interface, I will describe in a future post.
I hope, you enjoy these enhancements.
8 comment(s) so far...
Re: 4.6.0. A Sneak Peek (6) - Bulk Mail (Admin Newsletter)
Sounds great, I just had a client ask about these exact enhancements. How hard would it be to back-port these to 4.5.5?
By davido on
9/12/2007
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Re: 4.6.0. A Sneak Peek (6) - Bulk Mail (Admin Newsletter)
Hi david,<br>you can copy files BulkMail.ascx and BulkMail.ascx.vb from Website/Admin/user as well as all files in library/components/mail, but will need to adopt TokenReplace calls, as this has undergone major changes.
Upgrading the portal will be aesier for sure ;-)
By leupold on
9/12/2007
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Re: 4.6.0. A Sneak Peek (6) - Bulk Mail (Admin Newsletter)
Great to see the groups.. my list of roles was getting rather long. Is there a chance this will ever become a standard module? I'd really like to use it outside of the admin menu.
By robax on
9/14/2007
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Re: 4.6.0. A Sneak Peek (6) - Bulk Mail (Admin Newsletter)
hmm, I would like it as well ;-)
By leupold on
9/14/2007
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Re: 4.6.0. A Sneak Peek (6) - Bulk Mail (Admin Newsletter)
An interesting use I can imagine is sending bulk SMSs by 'SMS by email'. I think that most operators require a syntax like :
sms@myoperator.com in the SendTo
and the phone number of the recipient somewhere in the subject.
If we can include the tokenized mobile phone number into the subject, I guess we could use the admin newsletter to send bulk SMSs.
By zoulou on
9/14/2007
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Re: 4.6.0. A Sneak Peek (6) - Bulk Mail (Admin Newsletter)
zoulou, you can use any user property into the subject or body of the email.
By leupold on
9/14/2007
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Re: 4.6.0. A Sneak Peek (6) - Bulk Mail (Admin Newsletter)
This is all very cool. I created a new project in Gemini that would extend this and allow for a very flexible email template, here is the desc:
The newsletter module is lacking decent subscription management, which is frustrating for websites that push our marketing emails but want to stay complient with anti-spam regulations.
I propose that a token is added to the email template that makes a unique URL to visit that, when clicked, will unsubscribe from a group that the token specifies (without having to log into the website) - Sending one last mail notifiying the user that they are no longer a part of the group, or that there account has been removed. There should also be a token that removes users from ALL public groups.
There could also be a token that displays the groups description - so that a template could be created that looks like this:
-----------------------------------
You have received this email because you have opted into emails of this type when you registered on our website. Your newsletter settings are listed below, to manage your settings you may login to our website, or click one of the links below:
Seasonal updates (4-6 emails per year) - SUBSCRIBED [CLICK TO UNSUBSCRIBE]
Weekly updates (50+ emails per year) - UNSUBSCRIBED [CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE]
If you would like to stop receiving all emails, [CLICK HERE TO BE REMOVED FROM ALL LISTS].
----------------
I actually had a scenario where my hosting provider - Godaddy dedicated servers - cut me off of their SMTP servers because my emails contained only a "login to our website to manage your subscription settings" message.
By mattchristenson on
9/15/2007
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Re: 4.6.0. A Sneak Peek (6) - Bulk Mail (Admin Newsletter)
this is currently beyond the scope of this module, that is generally intended for bulkmail to a closed membership. Until this will be changed, you might consider to use a 3rd party module.
By leupold on
9/15/2007
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