Encouraging the use of DomainKeys

To help ensure optimal deliverability to Yahoo! addresses, we are strongly encouraging all clients who use a non-jangomail.com From Address to ensure that their email messages are signed with DomainKeys. If you send from your @jangomail.com address, your messages are already DomainKeys signed. If you send from your own email address, then you need to setup JangoMail to sign messages for your domain.

Instructions on setting up DomainKeys can be found in this JangoMail DomainKeys Tutorial.

This week we will proactively be sending emails to those clients that send non-DomainKeys signed emails in order to encourage them to set up DomainKeys.

JangoMail sets up Comcast Feedback Loop

JangoMail has joined the Comcast Feedback Loop as of this afternoon. Now any Comcast.net users that report e-mailings from JangoMail as spam, will automatically have their e-mail addresses placed on the specific customer account's unsubscribe list. This will improve JangoMail's overall reputation with and deliverability to comcast.net e-mail addresses!

"View as a Web Page" now supports personalization

Many customers have asked for this recently. Now, when you insert a "View as a web page" link into your HTML e-mails, if you're using personalization syntax within the HTML e-mail, that personalization will now properly render in the web page. Previously, the "View as a web page" feature did not show personalization and instead showed the percentage / field name syntax (example: %%FirstName%%).

To insert a "View as a web page" link into your e-mail, you simply insert this code into the body of your HTML message:

Click <A HREF="http://x.jngo1.net/w.z?***uniqueid****">here</a> to view this e-mail as a web page.

Alternatively, if you're using the Enhanced HTML Editor, you can simply click the "Web" button to dynamically insert a "View as a web page" link wherever the cursor is. To learn more about personalization syntax in your e-mail messages, see this tutorial.

New Bounce Handling Rules

We have enhanced the way JangoMail handles bounces to improve overall system deliverability. Many of the top ISPs like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, GMail, and others have recently mandated that if an e-mail address bounces even once indicating that the mailbox doesn't exist, email marketers should cease mailing to that e-mail address immediately in order to ensure optimal email deliverability.

In conjunction with this, if a Bounce indicates that the mailbox does not exist, JangoMail will stop sending to this address from your account regardless of what numeric setting you have specified under My Options --> Bounce Handling.

However, if a Bounce indicates a temporary failure for that email address, then the numeric setting under My Options --> Bounce Handling will still apply.

Additionally the new Bounce handling mechanism will allow you to see the Bounce reasons for the life of your account rather than just for 7 days, once the enhanced Reporting module is in place (about six weeks from now).

Here are some examples to illustrate the new Bounce handling:

A bounce with a message like:
smtp;550 4.2.1 mailbox temporarily disabled: akidd4@verizon.net

is a temporary failure, and the setting under My Options --> Bounce Handling would apply.

A bounce with a message like:
smtp;550 No such user here

indicates that the mailbox does not exist at all, so a single bounce would prevent JangoMail from sending to this address in the future.

New Feature: Blocking sign-up form spam by specifying an Exclusive Referrer URL

In the past, we outlined a method to block sign-up form spam by changing the encoding type of your sign-up form. That method may be found here.

This method will not work, however, in cases where the spambot isn't coming through your web site's form but rather by avoiding a form alltogether and programatically doing a FORM POST to our form processor file, http://www.jangomail.com/APPLICATION/PGSF2.asp or http://www.jangomail.com/APPLICATION/PGSF2ENC.asp.

To defend against this new technique for propagating sign-up form spam, you can now specify an exclusive Referrer URL from where the signup form must originate. You can now assign a specific exclusive Referrer URL to a particular JangoMail Group. Then, if a form signup comes from a destination other than the exclusive Referrer URL you have designated, the signup will not be processed.

Currently there is no interface within JangoMail for you to be able to set an exclusive Referrer URL yourself for an e-mail Group. Currently, our support team must do this for you administratively should you wish to take advantage of this setting.

New Feature: Generating a Plain Text Message Automatically at Run-Time

You can now have JangoMail automatically generate a Plain Text version of your e-mail message, based on your HTML version, at the time the email message is sent (run-time). To do this, set your Plain Text message to the word "auto-generate".

There has always been the "Set Plain Text Automatically" button underneath the Plain Text Message field on the Send Email page. This button examines your HTML message and generates a Plain Text Message for you right before your eyes. However, there may be situations where you don't want to generate the Plain Text message right away but rather have the Plain Text message generated at the time the email message is actually sent.

There are 3 scenarios where this feature will be advantageous.

Scenario 1 - Embedded URLs

If you are using Embedded URLs within your e-mail message, your HTML message might look like:

<html>
<p>
Hello there.  Below you will find today's mutual fund prices:
</p>
[%%http://www.MutualFundCompany.com/Prices.aspx%%]
<p>
Thank you for investing in our mutual funds.
</p>
</html>

By setting the Plain Text Message field to "auto-generate", the following will take place at the time of e-mail sending:

1. JangoMail will retrieve the HTML content from the specified URL.
2. JangoMail will insert the HTML content into the HTML message.
3. JangoMail will generate a Plain Text version of the e-mail message based on the complete HTML message.

In this scenario, if you do NOT set the Plain Text field to "auto-generate", but instead use the "Set Plain Text Automatically" button on the Send E-mail page, the following will take place:

1. The Plain Text version will look like this:
   
   Hello there. Below you will find today's mutual fund prices.
   
   [%%http://www.MutualFundCompany.com/Prices.aspx%%]
   
   Thank you for investing in our mutual funds.
   
2. When JangoMail retrieves the HTML content from the URL, the Plain Text message will now contain HTML code, and we don't want that to happen!

Scenario 2 - Using the Web Service/API

When calling any of these methods:

SendMassEmail
SendMassEmailPrevious
SendMassEmailRaw

Setting the MessagePlain input parameter to "auto-generate" will allow JangoMail to generate a Plain Text version of your HTML e-mail for you automatically. The "Set Plain Text Automatically" button that is available in the JangoMail web interface is not available when using the API, so for any automatic conversion to take place, the MessagePlain input parameter must be set to "auto-generate". Otherwise, you would have to manually input a Plain Text version of your message.

Scenario 3 - Using Conditional Logic Statements

When using VBScript conditional logic statements in your e-mail message, the line spacing of plain text messages can be altered based on where you place your lines of code. These spacing issues can be avoided by setting the Plain Text field to "auto-generate" rather than placing actual conditional logic statements within the Plain Text field.

Feature Enhancement: Using wildcards when filtering a Group based on clicks

When filtering a Group by those that have clicked on a particular URL, you can now use wildcards in the URL.

For example, in the Advanced Filter Mode, the filter criteria based on a clicked URL would normally look like:

emailaddress in (##clicked-http://www.jangomail.com/pricing.asp##)

but now you can filter for anyone that has clicked on any URL that contains jangomail.com:

emailaddress in (##clicked-*jangomail.com*##)

This feature was added at the request of an evaluating customer.

Bug Fix: Sending a Campaign where Recipient Group has been DELETED

We have fixed a bug tonight that caused a campaign to completely fail if one of the recipient Groups had been deleted between the time of creating the campaign and the time of campaign sending.

NOW, if a campaign includes a Group that has been deleted, the campaign will still send to all other present Groups and will gracefully skip over the Group that has been deleted.

New Feature: Large Text Fields in Groups

When managing fields in your Groups, you now have the ability to create a special type of field which allows for storage of a large amount of text data.

Previously:

1. Fields in Groups could store a maximum of 8,000 characters
2. The total amount of personalization amongst all fields within any single e-mail campaign could not exceed 7,900 characters.

Now:

1. A "large text" field in a Group can now store virtually an unlimited number of characters.
2. There is no limit to the amount of personalization within an e-mail campaign.

To create a Group field that can store large amounts of text:

1. Within your Group, click on "Modify Fields in Group".
2. You can add a new Group field that stores large text by choosing a name for the field and checking the box labeled "Will store large text data".
3. You can convert an existing field by clicking the "Convert" button next to the existing field.
4. If using the API, use the AddGroupField_Big method instead of the regular AddGroupField.

Warning: The caveat of a large text field is that you cannot segment your Groups nor use Conditional Logic on large text fields.

New API Methods to Retrieve Unsubscribes

We have three new API methods that allow you to pull the entire list of unsubscribed addresses and their dates, from an account:

Reports_GetUnsubscribesByCampaign_DataSet
Retrieves list of unsubscribed addresses for a particular mass e-mail campaign. Returns a .NET DataSet.

Reports_GetUnsubscribesByCampaign_String
Retrieves list of unsubscribed addresses for a particular mass e-mail campaign. Returns a string.

Reports_GetUnsubscribesByCampaign_XML
Retrieves list of unsubscribed addresses for a particular mass e-mail campaign. Returns an XML document.

Bug Fix: Activity Tracking Reports with Merged Groups

Previously, when exporting an Activity Tracking report that was also merged with Group data, the report would fail to export to a CSV file, and the CSV file link would therefore fail to be sent via email.

This issue has now been corrected.

Awesome Enhancements to JangoMail Groups

Over the last few months, we have been busy architecting a brand new storage system to house JangoMail Groups. That project is now complete, and this week we're converting all JangoMail Groups over to our new system. To help you delineate which Groups have been converted and which haven't, we have temporarily placed an * symbol next to each Group that has been converted. You will see this when you click on the Groups and Email Addresses tab and view your Group listing.

Additionally, all new Groups created going forward will be using the new architecture.

The benefits of our new Groups architecture include:

1. The ability to have up to 240 fields in a Group with no performance degradation. Previously, you were limted to around 40, before sending to and segmentation on Groups would underperform.

2. Much faster segmentation of Groups when using the Filter and Send feature.

3. The Delete All Members button will now work almost instantaneously. Previously, this could take several minutes with large Groups.

4. The ability to search your Groups. You can search one specific Group or you can search all of your Groups at once. You can search on any field in a Group (such as E-mail Address, or First Name, or Company Name, for example), and you can search based on partially matching expressions. So if you want to find e-mail addresses across all Groups that contain "yahoo" in them, now you can!

5. Much faster Group imports.

New API methods to edit a Group member

We recently added the following two API methods, which some customers are already using to edit a Group member:

Groups_EditMember_ByAddress
Updates a field for a group member. Returns a string

Groups_EditMember_ByID
Updates a field for a Group member. Returns a string

As the two methods suggest, you can edit a Group member based on the member's e-mail address or the member's numeric ID.

For more information on our API, please see http://api.jangomail.com.

New Feature for Group Sign-Up Forms

You can now add a field to your Group named ReferrerURL, and if this field is present, when a new member joins your Group via a Web Site Signup Form, the URL of the page of the form will be captured and stored in this field.

This can be useful if you have multiple Group Web Site Signup Forms on multiple pages of your web site, and you wish to track from what pages within your web site most people are signing up.

Scrub processing is now multi-threaded

We have made Group scrubs multi-threaded, which means our system can now process up to ten Group scrubs at one time. This will greatly improve the speed at which Group scrubs are processed. We also have a built-in safety to ensure that no one single user can occupy more than three Scrub threads at the same time.

Update: Email Campaigns will no longer wait on Scrub Jobs

Previously, an outgoing e-mail campaign would be held up if the Group to which it was going had a pending Scrub job on it. We have now modified our code so that campaigns will go out, even if there is a pending Scrub on the E-mail Group to whom the campaign is going.

Bug Fix: Conditional Logic and the Enhanced HTML Editor

When using "greater than" and "less than" symbols with the Enhanced HTML Editor, the symbols would be replaced with "gt;" and "lt;" notations, as is proper HTML. This would then prevent conditional logic/VBSsript within the Body of the e-mail campaign from running properly.

We have fixed this bug by replacing the "gt;" and "lt;" notations with the proper "greater than" and "less than" symbols before the scripting engine processes the Body of the e-mail message.

New Feature for Master/Sub Accounts

We have added a feature tonight which allows you to designate individual sub-accounts to filter against the master account's unsubscribe list when an e-mail campaign is sent from the sub account.

Master account users can manage the unsubscribe settings for individual sub-accounts by going to the Account Info tab, then clicking the Manage Sub-Accounts button. From here, the master account user can toggle on and off the ability of sub-accounts to use the master account's unsubscribe list when sending e-mail campaigns.

New Feature: Are you sick of being thanked?

Often times, after sending an e-mail campaign, the sender receives an influx of "thank you" auto-replies from recipients. Tonight we have introduced a new Reply Management Feature that allows you to filter out "thank you" auto-replies from valid replies after you send an e-mail campaign.

You can choose to have these "thank you" auto-replies sent to a designated e-mail address, and you can have the subject of the e-mail prepended with some text. For example, you can pre-pend the subject of these e-mails with "THANK YOU: " so that you can easily identify these "thank you" autoresponses from actual replies. You can also choose to have "thank you" auto-replies not e-mailed to you at all but simply stored in Reporting for you to view.

By default, the "thank you" filter is off. To configure your "thank you" filter settings, go to My Options --> Reply Management.

Reply Filters Enhanced

We have made enhancements to our reply handling mechanism - the mechanism that separates and categorizes messages like out-of-office auto-replies, challenge-response emails, and valid replies after you send an e-mail campaign.

Specifically, reply messages that have the following text in the beginning of the Body will be treated as unsubscribes:

• please remove me
• dont send me
• don't send me
• please stop emailing
• stop sending me
• take me off
• unlist

Additionally, we have improved our Challenge-Response message filtering to include challenges from the following additional Challenge-Response vendors:

• ZoneAlarm Challenge Response
• Bsafe Online Challenge REsponse

Lastly, we have improved the "out of office" autoreply filter to include more phrases that indicate that the recipient is temporarily away.

All of these enhancements serve one unified purpose - they allow JangoMail clients to spend less time wading through replies that aren't really replies and more time responding to valid replies and generating revenue for their organizations.

New Feature: Capturing the IP Address and Web Browser from your Web Site Subscription Form

JangoMail allows you to create a Group, define fields for that Group, and then place a sign up form on your web site to add subscribers directly to your JangoMail Group. The process of creating the sign-up form for your web site begins with clicking the Sign Up Form for my Web Site button underneath your chosen Group in the Groups and E-mail Addresses main tab.

It is now possible to capture the IP address and web browser of your visitors. Simply create two extra fields in your Group:

1. IPAddress
2. WebBrowser

Adding these two fields to your Group will allow JangoMail to automatically capture your subscriber's IP address and web browser/operating system and will automatically add this data to each Group member's profile upon sign-up.

Note that if you add these two fields to your Group, and then use the Sign Up Form for my Web Site tool, form fields for these two fields WILL NOT be included in the generated HTML code, since we don't want actual subscribers actually inputting anything for these fields.

New Feature: Tracking when a Group Member was last modified

Tonight we have added a new feature that saves the date/time a Group Member was last modified. A Group Member's record can be modified in one of three ways:

1. You, the account administrator, edits the Group Member within the JangoMail interface.
2. The Group Member modified his own profile via the Group Member self-modification form that you can link to from within your e-mail campaigns.
3. Via the API

When you display the Group Member's information, the "Last Modified" timestamp will show. Additionally, if you export Group data, a new column of data, "LastModified", will appear in the exported CSV file.

Lastly, all API methods that retrieve Group member data will also pull the "LastModified" timestamp. These methods include:

Groups_GetMember_ByAddress_DataSet
Retrieves a Group member by the member's e-mail address. Returns a .NET DataSet.

Groups_GetMember_ByAddress_XML
Retrieves a Group member by the member's e-mail address. Returns an XML document.

Groups_GetMember_ByID_DataSet
Retrieves a Group member by the member's numeric ID. Returns a .NET DataSet.

Groups_GetMember_ByID_XML
Retrieves a Group member by the member's numeric ID. Returns an XML document.

Groups_GetMembers_DataSet
Retrieves members of a group Returns a .NET DataSet.

Groups_GetMembers_String
Retrieves members of a group Returns a string

Groups_GetMembers_XML
Retrieves members of a group Returns a string

Deleting files from remote image server

We fixed an issue today involving the deletion of files from the Image Manager. Previously, if you deleted an image from your account's Image Manager, the file would be removed from our local server but would not be removed from our remote image server, img.jangomail.com. Therefore, even if you deleted a file, it still would have been accessible if previously included in an e-mail campaign.

Now, when an image file is deleted, it is deleted from both places, our local server, and our remote image server, img.jangomail.com.

Group Signup Forms for Web Sites -- No Longer Processing on Inactive Accounts

Up until now, the Group Signup Form for customers' web sites worked even if a JangoMail account was inactive. We have now modified so this mechanism so that subscriber signups from web site forms will no longer be added to a JangoMail Group if the corresponding JangoMail account is inactive.

API/Web Service Enhancement

We have deployed a new version of our web service tonight (http://api.jangomail.com) that provides for better logging of successes and failures of method calls to our internal support staff. This new detailed logging mechanism will allow us to more easily and more efficiently determine the causes of issues that customers may experience with method calls, such as when programmatic exceptions are thrown due to invalid input parameters.

We're hiring!

JangoMail is looking for a Senior Email Deliverability Analyst to join our deliverability team. The successful candidate will have a thorough understanding of email deliverability issues, the SMTP protocol, excellent communication skills, and 2-5 years of experience working in the field of email deliverability.

Do you or someone you know fit the bill? This is a position where you can work virtually from anywhere in the world, such as a home office. For a more detailed job description, please see this LinkedIn job posting:

http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=325828

New Feature in Beta: High Speed Imports of Recipient Lists via FTP

We are beta-testing a new high speed recipient list import mechanism with several customers. This feature allows you to FTP a flat text file containing recipient data to JangoMail. JangoMail then performs a high-speed import of your recipient data into a JangoMail Group-like structure, allowing you to send to your file as you would a JangoMail Group. The difference is you can import hundreds of thousands of records this way in mere seconds!

However, the limitation with this method of importing data is that you cannot take advantage of regular Group features, such as:

• Autoresponders
• Giving a link to allow a subscriber to modify his Group profile
• Giving a link to allow a subscriber to delete his Group profile
• Segmenting data based on field criteria
• Segmenting data based on recipient behavior
• Merging report data with field data from the recipient file
  

This "quick and dirty" method of importing data is meant for those users where import time is of the essence, and the other advanced JangoMail Group features aren't necessary.

New API Methods to Retrieve Group Members

We have added 3 new API methods:

Groups_GetMembers_XML
Groups_GetMembers_DataSet
Groups_GetMembers_String

These methods can be called to export a Group's data in any of the three formats: XML, .Net DataSet, or String.

For a complete listing of methods, see http://api.jangomail.com

Upgraded HTML Editor and Windows Vista Issues Fixed

Tonight we upgraded the Enhanced HTML Editor to version 6 of Ephox's EditLive editor, and this upgrade will fix all Windows Vista compatibility issues that existed before. Several Windows Vista users had reported that the Enhanced HTML Editor would not load -- this problem is now corrected.

Additionally, some Windows Vista users had reported not being able to access the JangoMail web site at all -- this issue was corrected about a month ago. This issue was due to the fact that Windows Vista implements TCP/IP completely differently than past versions of Windows, and the new implementation was incompatible with our core firewall. This has now been corrected.

New Feature: Preview just the Plain Text version

Tonight, we've added a new feature that allows you to send just the Plain Text version of your e-mail message to yourself, in addition to the full version containing both HTML and Plain Text (where most e-mail clients will then display the HTML version).

When you click the Preview/Save button in the Send E-mail section, if your e-mail campaign has both HTML and Plain Text message parts, you will see a checkbox in the popup window underneath the e-mail address box. Check the box if you wish for an additional Plain Text version of your e-mail message to be sent to you.

Press Coverage of JangoMail

We have a new section on our web site, entitled "In the News..." that lists recent press coverage received by JangoMail.

http://www.jangomail.com/InTheNews.asp

New Foreign Language Features

Several enhancements have been made to even further support foreign languages:

1. Foreign characters are now supported in the From Display Name. Previously they were not supported.

2. Foreign characters will now display properly in the "General Job Statistics" report in the "Reporting" section. Previously foreign characters would display has question marks.

JangoMail now supports DomainKeys and DKIM

JangoMail is one of the first e-mail marketing companies to launch support for both DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). The official announcement and press release will be issued on Monday, but emails that you send with a @jangomail.com From Address are already being cryptographically signed with DomainKeys and DKIM!

This will help with deliverability to receivers that validate based on these technologies, like Yahoo! Mail and GMail.

For more information JangoMail's implementation of DomainKeys/DKIM and for instructions on how to set up your own From Address domain to take advantage of these technologies, see the document:

DomainKeys and DKIM in JangoMail

Bug Fix on Send E-mail Page

A user last week reported a bug where the states of the "Do not send duplicates" and "Bounces go to JangoMail" checkboxes would not be preserved during an Editor switch. Instead, these checkboxes would always revert to the checked state after an Editor switch.

This has now been fixed.

New Group Scrub Option: Deleting unconfirmed email addresses

If your Group is a confirmed opt-in Group, you can now periodically delete unconfirmed e-mail addresses from your Group. You can do this by performing a "Scrub" on your Group. Along with the usual scrub types (removing unsubscribes, bounces, duplicates, etc.), you can now choose to scrub out unconfirmed Group members.

You can do this as a one-time or a scheduled scrub.

New Feature: Dynamically Inserting Subject into Message

At the request of a JangoMail client, we have developed a feature which allows for the insertion of an e-mail message's Subject into the message Body dynamically. This feature uses regular personalization syntax. To insert the Subject into the Body, use %%Subject%%.

For example, if the Subject of your e-mail message is "Hello %%FirstName%%, here is a special offer for you" and you wish for this same text to appear in the Body of your e-mail message, simply insert "%%Subject%%" into the Body of your message.

A couple notes:

• If the Subject contains its own personalization parameters, the personalization on the Subject will be done before the "%%Subject%%" in the message's Body is replaced.
• If "Subject" is already a field name in your Group or in your database table, then that Subject's value will take precedence over the e-mail message's Subject. So if the Group you are sending to has a field called "Subject", and then you use "%%Subject%%" in your message's Body to personalize, the Group field's value, and not the messages's Subject, will be used to replace occurences of "%%Subject%%".
  

"Set Plain Text Automatically" feature now converts HTML lists

We've improved the "Set Plain Text Automatically" feature, which automatically generates a plain text version of your email based on the HTML version of your email. Now, HTML lists, both bulleted and numbered, with "ul", "ol", and "li" tags will properly be converted to a plain-text list with each item beginning with an asterik (*).

For example, the following HTML list would be converted as follows.

HTML List:

• Embedded URL feature now supports personalization (read more)
• Autoresponder response times have been decreased for "immediate" autoresponders (read more)
• Our farm of distributed SMTP e-mail sending servers has expanded from 8 to over 30.
• Mass e-mail initiations, those email broadcasts triggered from your own e-mail client, are now processed much faster with a dedicated domain (@init.jangomail.com) for processing these e-mail messages. (read more)

After being converted to plain text:

* Embedded URL feature now supports personalization (read more)

* Autoresponder response times have been decreased for "immediate"
autoresponders (read more)

* Our farm of distributed SMTP e-mail sending servers has expanded from
8 to over 30.

* Mass e-mail initiations, those email broadcasts triggered from your
own e-mail client, are now processed much faster with a dedicated
domain (@init.jangomail.com) for processing these e-mail messages.
(read more)