This looks great. One concern I always have with sending out large email campaigns from my server is that it requires a lot more whitelist/blacklist management at the ISP level. So I usually use services such as MailChimp. Do you have any recommendations to overcome these concerns or are they overblown?
Your concerns definitely aren’t unfounded. Boomerang will not be right for everyone (e.g. those trying to send tens of thousands of emails from a small shared server may get frustrated or max out their host’s email send limit).
But if you have a solid server (preferably with a dedicated IP)—something like a MT(dv) or similar, you might be surprised how reliable it can be, and for under a hundred bucks, it can pay for itself in just a couple of mailings over MailChimp or Campaign Monitor.
I may have uncovered a bug when sending an email to an Apple Mail.app user.
When sending an email using a mailing list (whether it be multiple addresses, or a single address in the list) the delivered email is not rendered in HTML, the output appears to be the raw source minus the email header info.
However, when sending an email using the ‘Quick Send’ test feature, to both a single address, and to comma separated muliple addresses the HTML is rendered perfectly in Apple Mail.app.
Any ideas?
Other that that, this is a cracking module, it does need that dynamic function, but that issue can be worked around for the time being.
When sending an email using a mailing list (whether it be multiple addresses, or a single address in the list) the delivered email is not rendered in HTML, the output appears to be the raw source minus the email header info.
On my test everything came through fine, so lets look at a couple of items here:
Does the same exact email show up okay in other email clients, like Gmail or Thunderbird?
What version of Mail.app do you have?
What’s your server environment?
Every client I have tried so far (gmail, hotmail, horde webmail, amail, Outlook, Outlook Express) all render perfectly.
I have also made sure that EE Communications tab is sending html email correctly to both single addresses and mailing list addresses. Mail.app is displaying those correctly.
I am running Mail Version 3.6 (936) on 10.5.8
Serverside it is a dedicated CentOS server running Plesk 9.2.1.
I have tried changing the EE (1.6.7) mail admin settings to use phpmail, sendmail and smtp (through 2 different hosts), all with exactly the outcome as described.
@Flatulent Badger: Very bizarre. I’m on Mail Version 3.6 (935/935.3), so i’m doing the latest OSX update to see if something changed, however unlikely.
My first guess is an email headers glitch. The test send and the full send go through different processes (to bypass tracking, for example), so it’s possible the headers aren’t identical or something. We’ll dig in and see what can be done, but it’ll be tough if we can’t reproduce it, so let’s hope this does it.
In an attempt to try and figure out if any plugins/extensions or modules were conflicting, I made an exact copy of the EE database and site, installed this on a subdomain, updated config.php and updated the paths etc for the subdomain.
On the subdomain it works flawlessly. I’m stumped and need some sleep. Will attempt to figure out in the morning.
[UPDATE]
Tentative solution :
De-install Boomerang Module.
Disable FastCGI support on domain.
Restart server.
Install Boomerang and all is right in the world once again.
Okay yeah, definitely bizarre. My update didn’t change anything… Must be something glitchy with your install? I can’t think of anything that would do that.
My first guess is an email headers glitch. The test send and the full send go through different processes (to bypass tracking, for example), so it’s possible the headers aren’t identical or something. We’ll dig in and see what can be done, but it’ll be tough if we can’t reproduce it, so let’s hope this does it.
Apple Mail periodically will gobble up a message’s headers, rendering the message unreadable on my Mac desktop application. Except that if I start up Mozilla Thunderbird or access the same message by a webmail client, the message can be read. I think there may be a Mail.app bug in this respect. But it’s infrequent enough that I’m not worked up over it.
Hi Jack, I think it would be useful if there was a page on your site and definitely on this forum explaining who Boomerang is targeted for. Like you said, it’s not for the giant sites who need to do thousands of mailings a month… however, I’d like to have some range of numbers as to what would be best, as well as an “ideal” server setup for little problems.
That way we have a concrete idea of what it IS for instead of us trying to figure out if it’s not.
e.g. 4 emails to 100 recipients/month? 20 emails to 1000 recipients/month? More? Less? etc. etc.
I know that there can be multiple configurations, but I’m sure there is a “minimum optimal setup” as well as “ideal setup.” Not every client who may be interested in this will be on (dv) for example. Usually, those that are will probably have the bank to pay for monthly blasts through MailChimp or CampaignMonitor. I’m thinking of this software for my smaller clients, but I’m trying to figure out how small/medium they have to be.
Does the Boomerang automatically handle bounced emails? Hard and soft?
Currently there is no bounce detection, though we have some work in on the feature. It’s a bit complicated for users to set up though, as they need to be handed and subsequently parsed by an actual email address. There’s a possibility it will be added to the module in the future though.
This is a real big one, as one thing on large mailings that will get you throttled/blacklisted. Even Faster than pushing out a big mailing in a short period of time, is if your IP constantly comes back to the same place with the same bad/outdated email addresses over and over again. Not an issue if you are hitting Hotmail for instance with a couple of non-existent email addresses every week or so, but if you are ending up with say a couple of hundred that are being mailed to daily, you will quickly find yourself in hot water so to speak.
This is one reason at EngineHosting I generally recommend using external mail campaign places for doing large/frequent mailings they all handle bounced/bad delivery clean up, outbound mail is spread across a large # of outgoing mail systems, and they all generally have strong ties/contacts with the larger ISPs to assist with “concerns”. There are other concerns about mass mailings from web servers from a performance/resource perspective too, etc.
Still a great set of functionality, but just wanted to point out why bounce handling should be factored in if it will be used for large mailings.
Hi Jack, I think it would be useful if there was a page on your site and definitely on this forum explaining who Boomerang is targeted for. Like you said, it’s not for the giant sites who need to do thousands of mailings a month… however, I’d like to have some range of numbers as to what would be best, as well as an “ideal” server setup for little problems.
That way we have a concrete idea of what it IS for instead of us trying to figure out if it’s not.
e.g. 4 emails to 100 recipients/month? 20 emails to 1000 recipients/month? More? Less? etc. etc.
I know that there can be multiple configurations, but I’m sure there is a “minimum optimal setup” as well as “ideal setup.” Not every client who may be interested in this will be on (dv) for example. Usually, those that are will probably have the bank to pay for monthly blasts through MailChimp or CampaignMonitor. I’m thinking of this software for my smaller clients, but I’m trying to figure out how small/medium they have to be.
That’s a great idea. I’ll gather some information based on our current users and see how various levels work. I will say that if you’re on something like a Media Temple (dv) or similar, you could probably send 10,000+ weekly without a problem. However, if you’re on EngineHosting, you’re capped at 250 as they limit a lot of stuff on their servers. A matrix of some of this info would be a good way to go.
