New Features for Mass Email Initiations

Tonight we have added a slew of enhancements to our Mass Email Initiation feature. This is the feature that allows you to send an email campaign to one or more Groups by composing and sending your email message from an outside email program, like Outlook, GMail, or even a Blackberry.

New enhancements to this feature allow you to:

1. Have a word or phrase automatically pre-pended to the Subject of the email campaign.
2. Have JangoMail authenticate the email by the From Address rather than by looking for [password-send] in the Subject line.
3. Encompass the message as received within a pre-defined template. For example, if you wish to send a simple text message from your Blackberry, and have that text message inserted into a more aesthetically pleasing template before the email message is sent to Group members, you can now do that.

Below is a screenshot of the new Mass Email Initiation settings page under My Options --> Mass Email Initiations:

New Super Reporting Features

On Friday, we launched a few Super Reporting enhancements. They include:

1. Numbers now have commas in them, when greater than 3 digits.

2. The Filter box at the top of each report will now clearly indicate when a Filter is in effect. This will eliminate confusion when only certain rows of the Report are displayed due to a previously-set filter.

3. The Campaign Details page now shows all of the individual properties of the e-mail campaign. Here's an example:



4. Under the Recipients section, the Actions report now has a "Bounced" column:



5. Under the Recipients section, there is a new "By Domain / Actions" report:

Salesforce.com Integration, Phase I

We have released the first part of our Salesforce.com integration, a section within JangoMail that allows you to pull in your Leads/Contacts in real-time from your Salesforce.com account, and then send an email campaign to your Leads/Contacts, or a subset of Leads/Contacts.

To use this feature, your Salesforce.com account must allow API access. Salesforce.com Enterprise and Unlimited edition accounts have API access turned on by default, but API access is also available for Professional edition a la carte.

From JangoMail, click the Extract from My Database tab, and then click on the Connect to Salesforce.com button.

Below is a screenshot:

Feature Enhancement: Web database connections now support HTTPS

When configuring JangoMail to connect to a web site's database, the connection to the customer's web server can now be done over the secure HTTPS protocol rather than the HTTP protocol. Previously, only the HTTP protocol was supported, and to ensure security, a private key encrypted database information passed to the customer's web server, and that same private key decrypted the database information on the customer's web server. Now, the HTTPS protocol will itself ensure the encryption and decryption of database credentials. In time, we will deprecate the JangoMail custom private key encryption mechanism and encourage all customers to use this feature over HTTPS.

The form where you specify the URL for the special script file now contain a drop-down where you can specify http:// or https://.

See the below screenshots:

New Feature: Click Tracking Enhancement

Tonight, we have enhanced the Click Tracking feature. Click Tracking now allows you to pass campaign and recipient-personalization variables through to your destination URL.

You can choose to append personalization variables to the destinatinon URL by going to My Options --> Click Tracking.

Below is a screenshot:



Here's an example. If your e-mail campaign links to http://www.browniekitchen.com/WelcomeVisitor.html, then the e-mail recipient's browser will go to the following when the link is clicked:

If box is unchecked:

http://www.browniekitchen.com/WelcomeVisitor.html

If box is checked:

http://www.browniekitchen.com/WelcomeVisitor.html?
MassEmailID=24343243&email_id=98434&emailaddress
=john@doe.com&FirstName=John&LastName=Smith&
submission_date=1/1/08&confirmed=True

Therefore, checking the box allows you to program your web page to display a personalized message to the recipient based on the variables in the URL.

Open Tracking Bug Fix

We have modified the 1-pixel open-tracking GIF image so that it is transparent instead of white. A customer using a colored-background HTML e-mail campaign informed us that he could see the white 1-pixel "dot" used to track opens at the bottom of his email campaign.

Therefore, we have modified the 1-pixel "dot" to be a transparent GIF rather than a white GIF.

New Feature: Set your own notification preferences

You can now control which JangoMail email notifications you receive, setting individual preferences for:

• Sending Complete notifications
• Import Complete notifications
• Scrub Complete notifications

To set your notification preferences, go to My Options --> Notifications.

Below is a screenshot: