Tuesday, April 9, 2013

This message opened by ... Anonymous

Email Address Privacy
We had a prospective customer recently come to us with an interesting request with regard to the privacy of their email recipients. They wanted the actions of their email recipients to be anonymized in such a way that in no way would it be possible for anyone to determine which specific email addresses opened, clicked, unsubscribed, or experienced a bounce in a given email.

The prospective customer had a real concern for the privacy of their recipients but still desired the aggregate reporting metrics that make things like measuring the effectiveness of a group of emails possible. Total clicks? Great. Who clicked on which link? Gone.

We were happy to custom-develop this feature for the customer. And since we developed the software to do it for them, we can make it available to you  upon request.

The feature ensures that the specific email addresses are purged from the database and removed from the SMTP logs after receipt, ensuring they cannot be retrieved or compromised by anyone. The total actions for each transactional group are still aggregated and made available via reporting. 
 
This feature is a good example of how we're willing to go lengths to fulfill the needs of a customer who knows what they want. While this may seem obscure, if you'd like this feature added to your account, or have another custom feature in mind, please don't hesitate to ask.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Upgrade your emails with vBulletin

The first step to maximizing the effectiveness of popular forum software, like vBulletin, is to enhance them through configuration with JangoSMTP or JangoMail.

vBulletin is a helpful forum software package that facilitates online community discussions related to your business. The system also sends a variety of transactional emails: new registration confirmations, topic reply notifications, PM notifications, and more.

So how can JangoSMTP improve your vBulletin account?
JangoSMTP offers more email reporting features than what you will find in vBulletin's package. JangoSMTP's email delivery and tracking capabilities ensure that your signup confirmation emails will go through the first time and be open and click tracked. It's a common issue with forum software - if a user doesn't receive their confirmation email, they can't use your forum. As a result, users need to contact your forum administrator to activate their accounts manually, which is not ideal, especially if you have a large forum.

Here's how to set it up:
1. Log into your vBulletin Admin CP
2. Go to Settings - Options - Email Options - Edit Settings
3. Scroll down to choose the following settings:

  • SMTP Email: Yes
  • SMTP Host: relay.jangosmtp.net
  • SMTP Port: either 25, 2525, 587 or 465 for SSL/TLS connections
  • SMTP Username: use your JangoSMTP username
  • SMTP Password: user your JangoSMTP password
  • SMTP Secure Connection (can be enabled if port 465 is used)

vBulletin can also be used to send mass email newsletters to your users, to keep them engaged. To do so, go to Users - Send Email to Users within your Admin CP and configure it with a JangoMail account.

As always, if you have any questions or need extra help configuring your vBulletin account with JangoSMTP, contact us at any time.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Quick Account Usage Info at Your Fingertips

We added a quick go-to menu, accessible at the top of every JangoSMTP page that shares some of your account's vital statistics at a glance.

(displayed on mouse-over "13 days until,..")

When you are logged into your paid account, you will now see a link at the top of every page identifying how many days are left in your usage cycle. Mousing over the link produces a dialogue with stats including:

  • # of Messages used
  • # of Messages remaining
  • Volume of Data used
  • Volume of Data remaining
  • Messages and Data Available in the next cycle