HTML Editor Upgrade / New "Send E-mail" Features

We have upgraded our Enhanced, Java-based HTML editor. We have also enhanced the look/feel/functionality of the "Send E-mail" page. If you use the Enhanced Editor (as opposed to the Simple Editor), the following changes are now in effect in the editor:

1. The "Insert Images" dialog box has a better and faster user interface. Firefox users previously were unable to insert images using the Enhanced Editor, but now this has been fixed.

2. There is now an "Upload Images" button to the immediate left of the "Insert Images" button.

3. Some users were experiencing an issue where the spell-check feature would not work. This has been resolved, and spell-check should now work for ALL users.

4. The font and heading dropdowns now contain the options in the actual fonts and headings that are available.

5. There is now a "Print" option under the "File" menu.

6. Composing a plain text version of your HTML message is now as simple as clicking a button. Click the "Set Plain Text Automatically" button next to the Plain Text field, and JangoMail will automatically generate a plain text message based off your HTML message in the Enhanced Editor.

7. The "personalization" instructions above the Subject/Message area can now be expanded/collapsed at will, which gives the page a much cleaner and efficient look.

8. You can now decide whether the Plain Text or the HTML Editor loads when you first go to the "Send E-mail" page. You can configure this option under My Options --> User Preferences --> Send E-mail Page.

JangoMail now offers Dedicated IPs

Starting today, JangoMail is offering dedicated servers with dedicated IPs for those customers wishing to send mass e-mails through servers setup exclusively for them.

While JangoMail has some of the highest deliverability rates in the industry through our shared pool of high performance SMTP senders, high volume customers that want the ultimate deliverability solution may be interested in sending through a dedicated server with a dedicated IP address.

Benefits include:

*Blocks caused by other customers won't affect e-mails sent through dedicated servers

*The best deliverability rates possible

*The ability to brand the e-mail routing headers around your organization's domain (for example, if your domain name ise browniekitchen.com, your dedicated SMTP server can be set to smtp1.browniekitchen.com).

If you are an existing customer and would like to upgrade to a dedicated server, please contact us using our Support form at https://www.jangomail.com/Support/.

New customers can contact us at http://www.jangomail.com/ContactForm.asp.

Feedback loop established with MSN/Hotmail

JangoMail has established a feedback loop with Microsoft that allows MSN/Hotmail recipients to automatically be unsubscribed from a JangoMail customer's account when they report an e-mail as spam within the MSN/Hotmail environment.

You will now see manual unsubscribes in your account for @msn.com and @hotmail.com e-mail addresses. These are a result of the recipients reporting your e-mail message as spam, and the feedback loop kicking in to automatically unsubscribe these recipients.

Smaller "Powered by JangoMail" icon available now

There is now the option of having a smaller "Powered by JangoMail" graphical icon added to the bottom of HTML e-mail messages. Here is what the smaller icon looks like:

"Powered by JangoMail" footer to be added to complimentary/discounted customer accounts

Starting next week, JangoMail will begin adding a "Powered by JangoMail" graphical footer to the bottom of e-mail broadcasts sent through customer accounts which are either complimentary or discounted.

The graphical footer will link to JangoMail's home page and will look like this:



Additionally, a two-sentence footer will be added to text messages.

After never having forced a "Powered by JangoMail" footer in JangoMail's entire history, we now feel that this will be a good marketing tool to help us grow, which in turn, will allow us to continue to provide our complimentary/discounted customers with excellent service.

If you are a paying customer, and would like to do us a huge favor, you can also agree to have the footer appended to your mass e-mails. Just contact us, we'll gladly add the footer, and we will deeply appreciate you allowing us to do this.

You can now EDIT an existing e-mail message

On the "Send E-mail" tab, there is now an option to edit an existing e-mail campaign.

Editing an existing e-mail campaign is necessary:

1. If you want to make changes to a scheduled mass e-mailing that has not been sent yet (before the "edit" feature, you would have to schedule the e-mail again with the changes made, and then delete the first e-mailing).

2. If you want to make changes to a mass e-mailing from the past that you might now want to use as an autoresponder, in a recurring schedule, as a Trigger, or as a confirmed opt-in message.

Note that while editing a campaign, you are overwriting the data for an e-mail campaign. You cannot send to your recipients while in edit mode, although you can send a test (preview) message to yourself. If you want to use an old e-mail message as a starting point for a new e-mail campaign, then use the "Re-send Old Message" option from the "Send E-mail" tab.

New Feature: Triggers

We will soon be officially announcing the launch of our newest feature, Triggers. Triggers allow you to send automated, follow-up e-mail messages to your recipients who take a particular action on a past e-mail message.

You can setup such an automated follow-up e-mail when a recipient clicks a link, opens an e-mail message, or visits a page on your web site. For example, you can use triggers to send a follow-up e-mail 24 hours after a recipient opens your first mass e-mail announcing your new product. Or, you can use triggers to send a “thank you” e-mail immediately to a recipient that lands on the “purchase” page of your web site.

Download the tutorial on Triggers.

Cleaner look for the "Send E-mail" page

We have made some slight design modifications to the "Send E-mail" page which gives it a cleaner look:

1. The form fields have all been pushed about 50 pixels to the right, making them more flush with the black vertical line that does down the right. This frees up more whitespace on the left side of the screen and makes the screen more pleasing to the eye.

2. The colored box above the Subject field that explains personalization now does so more clearly and contains a link to the JangoMail Personalization Tutorial. The box also no longer spans the width of the entire screen.

You can now save Group Filters

While using the Advanced Query Editor to segment and filter Group members, you can now save filters under a friendly name, which allows you to run the filters later without re-composing the filter criteria.

New Feature: Additional synchronization options for web databases

The second phase of our new "Behavioral Targeting" feature has been completed. Those customers that use JangoMail to pull data in real-time from their web site's databases can now have JangoMail write data back to their databases based on recipient's behaviors.

The following actions can be synchronized with a web database:

1. Unsubscribes
2. Bounces
3. Change of e-mail address requests
4. E-mail opens
5. E-mail clicks
6. Forward to friend requests
7. Web site activity

Each action can be associated with a custom SQL query which will be executed against the web database when the action occurs. By taking advantage of these synchronization options, you can send targeted mass e-mail campaigns to your e-mail database based on a recipient’s past behavior. For example, you can send to just those recipients that opened a particular e-mail campaign or clicked a particular link in a particular campaign.

To learn more about JangoMail's ability to communicate with a web database, see the updated tutorial.

New Feature / New Tutorial: Filtering Groups Based on Past Member Behavior

In preparation for our "Behavioral Targeting" feature which will be officially launched next week, we have published a new tutorial on filtering group members. The tutorial can be downloaded here.

You can now filter Group members based on the Group member's past behavior, such as clicking a link in a certain campaign, or opening an e-mail, or visiting a certain page on your web site.

This tutorial teaches you how to filter a Group to send to only members that match a certain criteria. Perhaps you only want to send to the Hotmail addresses in a Group. Perhaps you only want to send to those Group members whose “Age” is over 30. Perhaps you only want to send to those members of the Group that have joined the Group in the last 60 days. Perhaps you only want to send to those members of the Group who have clicked at least one link in a prior e-mail campaign. You can accomplish all of these by filtering your Group. You can filter your Group based on two kinds of criteria:

1. The information you have stored for each Group member in the Group’s fields, such as FirstName, LastName, Age, DOB, City

2. Information stored in your JangoMail account about the Group member’s past behavior, such as clicks and opens

For more information, see the tutorial.

Our "Private Label" customers will see a branded version of this tutorial within their application's "Help" tab.

New Tutorial on Unsubscribe and Bounce Management

Because JangoMail provides such sophisticated and robust unsubscribe and bounce management, we've published a comprehensive tutorial covering these subjects. The tutorial can be downloaded here.

The tutorial covers the following topics and more:

• How to add unsubscribe instructions to your e-mail


• How to customize what the recipient sees after clicking the unsubscribe link


• How to brand the unsubscribe link itself


• How to remove unsubscribed addresses from your Groups


• How to let recipients unsubscribe from a particular Group rather than your whole account


• How to add/remove unsubscribed addresses and domains


• How JangoMail takes feedback data from AOL, Outblaze, and other ISPs and automatically unsubscribes users that report your e-mailings as spam


• How to synchronize unsubsribed addresses with a web database


• How to customize bounce handling


• How to view bounced e-mail messages


• What counts as a "bounce" message and what does not

Our "Private Label" customers will see a branded version of this tutorial within their application's "Help" tab.

We've updated our "client testimonials" page

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

Find our what our customers have been saying about us...we've updated our testimonials page to include comments from customers from the last year and a half. Remember that JangoMail's testimonials are not fabricated quotes. They are real and unsolicited e-mail messages that we have received from our customers!

Subject line LENGTH validation on Send E-mail page

Some customers have been getting an error after clicking the "Send" button on the "Send E-mail" page if the Subject line is too long (greater than 200 characters).

We have now added a validation check so that you get a popup alert asking you to shorten your Subject line if JangoMail detects that the Subject line is too long when you hit the "Send" button.

mail.jangomail.com will now refuse connections from spammer IPs

As an extension to the JangoMail Spam Blocker, every day starting wtih today, IP addresses that send mail.jangomail.com (the incoming e-mail handler for @jangomail.com e-mail addresses) the highest amount of spam e-mail will be added to a blocklist that will prevent them from establishing a connection on port 25 to mail.jangomail.com.

This additional security measure will further reduce the amount of spam received as replies to mass e-mailings, and will conserve overall JangoMail network resources and bandwidth.

Multi-threading added to core sending process

The JangoMail engine processes mass e-mails in two steps. In the first step, a mass e-mail is pre-processed, where it is determined who the actual recipients are. The original recipient list is filtered for unsubscribes, bounces, duplicates, invalid e-mail addresses, and other measures. In the second step, JangoMail's network of distributed senders around the country actually send the indvidual e-mail messages.

It is the first pre-processing step that is now multi-threaded. Previously, this step operated in a linear fashion, pre-processing one mass e-mail job at a time. Occasionally, this would cause a delay in sending e-mails, when say, a customer sent out one mass e-mail to 2,000,000 recipients. All mass e-mail jobs submitted after the big job would have to wait while the big 2,000,000 recipient job was pre-processed. This wait has now been eliminated, because our new code can pre-process multiple mass e-mail jobs at a time.

This will result in greater overall e-mail sending speed across the entire JangoMail application!

Updated challenge-response filters

We have updated our incoming e-mail filter to categorize two more types of challenge-response e-mails:

1. Spam Sleuth challenge-responses
2. PeoplePC Spaminator challenge-responses

Previously, these types of challenges were being classified as User Reply e-mails. Now they will be appropriately classified as challenge-response e-mails.

How the spam blocker works

You may be wondering how JangoMail determines whether a response to a mass e-mailing is a valid reply or spam. The method JangoMail uses to decide is quite simple. Any response that doesn't fit into other categories, such as unsubscribes, bounces, out of office, etc., must be either spam or a valid reply from your recipient. The e-mail is assumed to be spam unless at least one of the following criteria are met, in which case the e-mail is a valid reply:

1. The Subject line of the e-mail is similar to the Subject line of a previously sent mass e-mail from your JangoMail account.

2. The From E-mail Address of the e-mail matches an address to which you've recently sent a mass e-mail.

3. The Body of the e-mail contains a special header that JangoMail includes on all outbound mass e-mails. This would indicate that the recipient replied to the e-mail, and left your original mass e-mail, with headers, at the bottom.

New Features: Spam blocker and better reply management

One of the complaints we frequently get from our higher volume and longer term customers is that they are frustrated with the amount of spam they receive at the address they use as their From Address in their mass e-mailings.

Why does this happen?

After a particular From Address has been used on large mass e-mailings, over time, the From Address becomes overexposed. Your From Address is obviously exposed to your recipients, and if your recipients have e-mail related viruses or spyware on their computers, your From Address can also be exposed to hackers and spammers.

We now have a spam blocker in place to combat this problem!

Our new spam blocker will filter out replies that are actually spam. Additionally:

1. You can decide whether or not they want to use the spam blocker.

2. If using the spam blocker, you can decide to have the e-mails classified as spam forwarded onto an e-mail address of your choice, or just sit in Reporting for viewing.

3. You can now decide what to prepend the subject line with in the cases of replies, challenge-responses, and spam messages. In the past, replies were always prepended with "USER REPLY: " and challenge response e-mails were always prepended with "CHALLENGE-RESPONSE: ". Now you can modify this text and add a prepend for spam e-mails as well, if you choose to have spam received by JangoMail sent to an e-mail address.

4. There is a new "Spam" category under Reporting --> Incoming Messages so that you can view spam that has been received by your account.

The default spam settings for all existing accounts and all new accounts are:

Spam blocker is on.
Spam is NOT e-mailed to any address.

All of these settings are under My Options --> Forward Replies To.

If in using our spam blocker feature, you notice false positives (e-mails being classified as spam that are legitimate replies), then please let us know so we can modify our spam-detection algorithm. You can let us know via https://www.jangomail.com/Support/.

Scrub reports will now contain an attachment

Details of a particular scrub report will no longer be contained within the body of the e-mail message. Rather, the particular details of the scrub report will now be in an attached text file to the e-mail message.