Hello!

Here is a changelog-like update, let you know what we have been up to.

The one thing to take away from this update: it is now very easy to bulk remove all track link keywords, and then bulk add others (all done on Admin UI / Links / Track Links page). Either go for the most common words like be, call, get (so it’s hard for anti-spam filters to single them out) or swap them out very often (daily, before every drop, etc). The second important suggestion is to ping joe@volomp.com to have your track links switched from the 20-year-old format to the new “anon format” (https://www.volomp.com/softwarenews/anon-track-links/). We believe these two changes to the default setup are important, and only the hugely successful clients should probably leave things as they are. Everyone else is well advised to switch. – Joe

The big switch to Centos 7 introduced a couple of speed bumps, header/footer API calls were among them – fixed.

If you ever searched for a recipient, and then edited some of their database fields – you might have noticed something funny going on. No more fun, works well now.

IPv6 is serious business, anyone mailing google and google suite domains (15% of the internet is my guesstimate) should take us up on our offer and try it out. Ping joe@volomp.com if you don’t know where to look for IPv6 ranges. Anyways, with IPv6 we are talking tens of thousands of ips in play at the time, so we are always optimizing our code to allow for it. And fix the delivery logs. And the bind/named configs. And on and on, there’s always something when you change/move/add stuff.

As always, turning your Volo into a whitelabel thing is easy, FREE, and it works great, we recently tested. Why not roll out a micro ESP where you can keep your clients on dedicated ips/ranges, shared ips/ranges, everyone’s data is safe within their account, you can throttle everyones ips/ranges individually.. Full control over the product!

Customer UI / Global / IP Configuration page, there’s a script running once a day checking all ips/domains for eventual listings with casa del spammo, plus senderscore. It needed a slight touchup. You can run that script manually on the Admin UI / System / Configuration page, it’s called: ip_testing

We tweaked a bit how often bind/named at the proxies gets restarted, aiming for less.

Several clients have their Namecheap account API feature switched on, and some of those have a jaw-dropping amount of domains in play. When a huge config is applied there’s a real need for a realtime progress indicator. Ta da! That is so since the start of April.

The stuff you see on the Executive Dashboard page are connection attempts, and you can only read those as they happen, no rewind feature yet. However, there is a shell counterpart called conn.log which contains the same information, and you can analyze it months after the fact (pending you had us switch it on in time). Anyways, a client had us add the message_id into the conn.log . By the way, there’s also the raw.log (full SMTP exchanges), which we can also turn on, just let us know.

Small tidbit, we added Cluster Manag, IP Ranges and Dom Conf to the Quick Links section on the Admin UI homepage.

Back in the day disks were slow and mysql was a mess. So recounting your list counts (which means reading every row in the mysql table) was an expensive operation, ran once per day, plus any time you click “Recount recipients”. Nowadays it’s a no brainer, so we tacked the recount job onto every list import etc.

If you are a GNU/Linux shell creature, you’ll be happy to learn each iptables rule now contains a comment with the ip address to which it pertains.

We worked on making the bulk From field feature a bit more usable. The New Message page was always the nexus of the Customer UI, and thus overloaded with bells and whistles. Bulk from, along other newer stuff makes it even more messy, but what can you do, different clients use different features, so they all have to be available.

If you wonder how to decrypt the anon links (https://www.volomp.com/softwarenews/anon-track-links/) – now you can simply paste the hash in the Recipients / Search input field, the system will figure it out for you.

We had a situation with a super long landing page, the length limit had to be bumped – done.

BIG ONE! We added “Custom headers“, i.e. ability to “fake” return-path, Message-ID and the To header. Faking the from field of course invalidates DKIM, but the feature is there if you know where to use it.

We used Let’s Encrypt to add the SSL certificates to the Volo hosted websites. The feature is mature by now.

We recognized two sorts of bots. One sort is coming from big cloud ips which we blacklisted (because who is using Amazon cloud to surf the web and click on email links?), so we call those – blacklisted bots. The other kind are bots who click on all links found in an email message, even the ones a human recipient is highly unlikely ever to see or click. So these clicky bots we call – bots! Anyways, for now we are gathering email addresses linked to both these kinds of bots, to be used later on. What you can do right now is protect your landing page from being visited by the bots, by forwarding them somewhere else, like http://google.com . That is available on the New Message page.

Dry-mode! As we mail we get chatter from the targets. It’s either:

• “250 OK” (all good)
• “I hate your ips” (soft bounce, unrelated to the recipient at hand)
• “That mailbox does not exist” (hard bounce, immediate invalidation of that email from all lists)

Now, a client asked if we can have volo abort SMTP convo as soon as we learn if the mailbox exists or not, without actually transmitting the message. So now you have the dry-mode checkbox on the New Message page to send a dry-run drop, which means no delivery but the hard bounces get weeded out. Before you had to actually deliver a drop to clear out the list, now you can use ip set A for cleaning and then ip set B for delivery.

The drop “details” popup on the Delivery Queue page contains bounce logs (including the Delivery log) and those logs used to last for 5 days before they would get removed. Now they are set to last 2 months before being erased. The old 5 day limit was due to the old file-system inode limitations.

The “Entire Internet” label on the Throttling page will now be renamed to “Box Limits”, to better reflect what it does.

As always, features are 5-15% of the update while tweaks and fixes make up the rest. Let us know if you think of something, we are happy to work on it.

Volo team