Group Scrub Tool Expanded

JangoMail's Scrub Group Members feature has been expanded to better "clean" lists of bounced addresses and to allow you to see what a Scrub will do before actually permitting the Scrub to change your data.

Previously, the Scrub to remove previously bounced addresses would remove those addresses that had bounced X times (per your My Options, Bounce Handling settings) prior, with the default being 3.

Now, you also have the option to remove "definitive" bounces that have occurred only once.

Why? Whitelisting requirements with many ISPs now dictate that definitive bounces are removed after a single bounce. As a result, JangoMail has been removing them "on the fly" during sending, as you see in Sending Complete email results, but this has not been reflected in the Scrub Group Members function until now.

A definitive bounce is one where the receiving server responds with a message indicating that the particular address does not exist on that server. Typically, these are the "user unknown," "mailbox not found," etc. types of addresses.

Concerned that a Scrub might not do what you expect? Now, get a Scrub report without actually changing any data. Use the new option at the top of the Scrub Group Members page to elect a View Only scrub.

Your Email Manager will get the Scrub Job Complete report, showing data as "VIEW ONLY." The total number of Group Members won't change, but the report's detail will show you what data would have been affected had you really run the Scrub.

Then, you can safely go back in and run the real scrub to clean your data, if you choose.

The email notification will have (VIEW-ONLY) in the Subject line, and the report will look like:

Enhancements to Reporting: Click Tracking All Positions

JangoMail has expanded Super Reporting's Click Tracking data.

Previously, Click Tracking reports sorted by URL would show Click Tracking data separately for each position of a URL within a message. If your URL appeared 3 times in a message, the Click Tracking data would be split among the positions, so you could see which position achieved the best results.

Now, in addition to the data split by position, we have included additional columns for Total Clicks All Positions and Unique Clicks All Positions so that you can quickly gauge interest in a particular link, regardless of its page position as well.

Bug Fix: Plain Text Preview

When using Preview/Save on a message under composition, users have the ability to check a box from the pop up to also have a plain text version of the HTML message sent separately so that it can be checked for appearance as well.

We have made two adjustments to the processing of the plain text message for Preview. These issues were NOT affecting campaigns that were actually sent ("Send E-mail" button), but only the Previews.

1. The From Address will no longer show a 4 digit numeric extension. Ex: browniekitchen0042@jangomail.com will now show simply as browniekitchen@jangomail.com.
2. When Click Tracking is enabled for the campaign, but disabled for the plain text version of the message, the additional tracking code will no longer show in the Preview version either. A link in plain text of http://www.browniekitchen.com will remain unchanged.

New Administrative Watch Feature

The JangoMail Support Team has added to its array of administrative tools with a new Alert feature. Your Support Team can now set a watch on your account to be alerted directly by email when a campaign of a given size is being launched.

This allows us to watch over your messages as you explore new features or as we may be assisting you with troubleshooting any concerns with message processing as the message is actually going out. When your Support representative sets the Alert, he/she will be notified by email when a campaign that meets the Alert's settings has been sent. The JangoMail user will not notice any change in how he/she sends, and the Support team can watch the campaign move through each step of the sending process closely.

Group Merge Available in Exported Reports

JangoMail has now updated our Super Reporting pages to again allow for merging Group data with reports during export. To use this feature, you must export by email (the envelope icon). The direct download to CSV will not perform the merge.

If you have sent a campaign to a JangoMail Group, you will be able to select that Group during export to see the list of data in the report, along with the data that was originally stored along with the email address in your Group.

Let's do an example:

• A campaign is sent to a Group containing the following data:
  
  emailaddress, customerID, firstname
  jane@doe.com, 12345, Jane
  smith@yahoo.com, 12346, Bob
  


• The Unsubscribes report shows that Jane unsubscribed, and we export that report.
  


• With a standard export, the email address would be included in the report, along with the date and time the address unsubscribed (jane@doe.com, 06/13/2008 01:00:00 PM).
  


• If the export is Merged with the original Group that received the message, the report would include the email address, the date and time of the unsubscribe, the customerID, and the firstname (jane@doe.com, 06/13/2008 01:00:00 PM, 12345, Jane).

This feature is most often used when exported data needs to be synchronized locally to other stored data. In the example above, we could then update Jane's information easily because we had her customerID -- and that is how our system tracks her.

User-Agent Identification Added

JangoMail will now identify itself with a User-Agent when making HTTP/HTTPS connections to your web server.

The JangoMail User-Agent will report as: JNHTTP

Customers examining their web logs will now be able to identify JangoMail's connections to their servers.

Technical Notes: Using the JangoMail API with Java

Robert Fischer is the creator of OffstageArts, an open source integrated arts management system (http://offstagearts.org). OffstageArts is written in Java and deployed via Java WebStart. Mr. Fischer has graciously provided notes on his solution for us to post so others can follow in his footsteps. Many thanks to Robert for sharing his work with us!

Using JangoMail with Java

The most convenient way to use JangoMail with Java is to use Java-based SOAP tools. Apache Axis (http://ws.apache.org/axis/) is available as a commponly used Java SOAP system. Although these tools can be intimidating at first, they make life much easier over the long run. Moreover, using them does not require much effort, just follow the steps below.

Axis is able to download the JangoMail WSDL web service description file and generate a set of JangoMail Java stub classes from it. You can then compile those classes and use them in your application. The JangoMail SOAP stub classes (generated by Axis) insulate you from the complexities of SOAP XML. An example of using these classes:

-------------------------------------------

// Make a service

JangoMail service = new JangoMailLocator();

// Now use the service to get a stub which implements the SDI.

String usr = "JangoMailUserName";
String pwd = "JangoMailPassword";
JangoMailSoap soap = service.getJangoMailSoap(new URL(https://api.jangomail.com/api.asmx));

soap.addGroup(usr, pwd, "TestGroup");
-----------------------------------------------

Doing It -- Automated

The easiest way to go through this process is to use the enclosed Netbeans/Maven project. For this, you will need NetBeans with the Maven Plug-in. If you do not have that, it can be obtained at: http://netbeans.org/ and then by following directions at: http://mevenide.codehaus.org/m2-site/mevenide2-netbeans/installation.html

With NetBeans+Maven, you are now ready to go:

1. Download and unzip the accompanying project from the following link, and open it in NetBeans: Download here.
2. Edit the file RunWsdl.java and make sure the variable "mavenProjectRoot" is set correctly for your project home directory.
3. Right-click on the project and select "Run." This should download the WSDL file and generate all the necessary Java classes in the project.
4. Right-click on the project and select "Clean and Build." This will compile the Java classes you just produced. Look at Test.java for a simple example on how these classes can be used.

This procedure has now produced a file "jangomail-1.0-LATEST.jar" that you can use in other projects. If your other projects are Maven- based, you can use the dependency:

groupId = com.jangomail
artifactId = jangomail
version = 1.0-LATEST

When the JangoMail API changes, you must re-run this procedure to make the updates available to your application.

Doing It -- Manual

If you do not have NetBeans + Maven, then you will need to download Axis and run it manually:

1. Download Apache Axis from http://ws.apache.org/axis/
2. Put all the jar files in Apache Axis on your CLASSPATH.
3. In a command shell, change directory to your source directory.
4. Run the command:
   java org.apache.axis.wsdl.WSDL2Java https://api.jangomail.com/api.asmx?WSDL
5. Compile the source code that results.

You can now use these classes in your own program, as given in the example above. You will have to include the Axis-supplied .jar files as well.

JangoMail for Salesforce official release

JangoMail for Salesforce has been certified by salesforce.com and is now officially on the AppExchange.

A press release will be sent to media outlets this morning, and and we'll be sending an email announcement to all of our clients later this week.