The summer sun is about to shine on us and make it all right! And this is what we have been making right since the last update:
The ability to warm up an ip address or a range by defining a start date, end date, and the parameters at the beginning and the end: https://gyazo.com/080f3ecccb8310974153e56b8b3976e0
Admin UI / System / Dictionary lets you upload files, let’s say one of those is called spanish.txt, then this will yield between 100 and 500 random words from that file: %% RndWord % 100 % 500 % @spanish.txt %%
Random number – get a random integer between min and max: %% RndNum % -300 % 100 %%
A quick way to upper/lowercase text: %%begin_style % uppercase %% the text goes here %%end_style%%
Volo API is now a first-order citizen of the Volo platform, a powerful tool in its own right. Here’s what’s new:
– Volo API is now enabled on all new installs, by default
– The latest docs (updated with the Volo update, if any changes) are avaliable at Admin UI / Help / XAPI Documentation
– Volo API lets you query and set the delivery_conf for the drop (of course, you can select it manually on the New Message page as well)
– Get a list of all the templates, get everything about template X
– Opt to send a test from each ip address (a novelty in the api, test_each_ip 1/0 in the send_test_message method)
Global / Subscribe Script, now you can [de]select all of the offered database fields (handy if you have many). Also now you can launch more than one autoresponder template.
Back to MyISAM for our big MySQL tables.
When you restart your Volo (or just the Volo engine) the list of ips you are using is rebuilt from scratch (once in a blue moon this fails, just restart again). Now, there’s a cron job called local_domains.txt that runs every 15 mins (and now also upon dom conf edit/save/apply), pulling data from the engine, compiling all the stats and placing all that on the Mailer UI / Global / IP Configuration page. The novelty is automatic running of that job upon Domain Conf save/apply, and the beefed up logging.
The “new” track links format (the one with the long hash after the domain) is a clear winner over the old format, we updated the Recipients / Search page so now you can decrypt those long hashes.
When you create a new track link you can assign an action. The action can contain steps like: [un]subscribe, put a value in the database, execute a GET request to an outside script… The click counter for the entire drop always gets incremented, even if that track link is in fact your external unsubscribe link.
For years we had the [No action] option which only masked the landing page but there were no further steps like [un]sub taken, and yet the clicks still counted.
Now the new [No tracking] option is exactly the same, minus counting the clicks. (Email Joe to support his lifelong quest of renaming these two to “Mask and count” and “Mask only” 🙂 )
Quick note, if you ever wanted to include base64 encoded recipient’s email in the landing page – go ahead, just make sure to put something, anything (like &) at the end to make it work right.
A small courtesy, you can now put notes on the throttling page ranges.
This is big – you can now use your Volo not only to pump into an external SMTP Relay (that works for decades) – now you can use the Volo as an SMTP Relay, on all (even proxy) ips! And IMAP works as well, so if you want to use an ip warmup service – now it works without a hitch (get Joe to turn the SMTP Relay feature on first, it’s a couple of switches plus you can make up the smtp relay user/pass yourself).
In fact there is a very nice thing about the whole SMTP Relay thing – you can now reply to your customers straight from the Admin UI / System / Inbox page, from the correct domain!
HTTPS/SSL/TLS – all Volo sending domains support TLS by default and you can check the status of the certs on the Admin UI / System / Owners page.
Want to reuse the same DNS pair whenever you create a new domain config – done, it’s prepopulated by default, just clear the “Point to itself” checkbox.
The Delivery Configuration page now let’s you specify the text and HTML charset and encoding, along the headers.
A small courtesy, you can now remove all track links on the New Message page with a single click.
Remember us recognizing bots by them clicking stupid stuff (ADMIN: BOTS) , and by them coming from impossible ip ranges (ADMIN: BLACKLISTED). The blacklisted ones are like clicks coming from Amazon Cloud etc. Well, turns out some ISPs start using international cloud services so we stopped applying the ADMIN: BLACKLISTED suppression file by default.
So you made 50 [autoresponder] templates or drafts and you want to delete them all – bulk delete now available.
A very meticulous client had us look into things and provide thorough explanations, for example the Advanced Selection (New Message, Export) works like this:
– First we get all records from selected mailing lists minus suppression mailing lists (lists, not files).
– Then we apply the limitations listed above, if any.
– Then we LIMIT
– Then we apply suppression files.
We now include this explanation on the UI, where applicable.
The Admin UI / System / Domain Conf page got spruced up, it loads up so much faster, it has pagination, and searching for a domain or an IP address shows the config that contains it. I am honestly happy about this update, finding out which config contains domain X used to be a needle in a haystack thing.
Volo now processes the SHA-512 suppression files.
Tired of calculating past dates, just want to advanced select all in the past 30 days? Here you go: https://gyazo.com/0c505cbab58ee0a16f3ecae7da5fd2e3
New Delivery Queue column option: an absolute number of complaints, used to be % option only.
So there you go, these are the things you can see or that you can use. The amount of technical stuff changed under the hood is as overwhelming as ever, plus all the small corner-case bugs we squashed – fuhgettaboutit 🙂
As always joe@volomp.com is here for any questions or suggestions, I would be happy to make your work day at least a tiny bit more streamlined and thus more enjoyable. Propose a feature and I’ll do my best to make it happen! Enjoy your summer! 🙂
