The maxprog web site was originally created in the late nineties with Adobe PageMill, later replaced by Adobe Golive and finally Dreamweaver. I used to edit code manually with TextWrangler quite often because it was faster and to say the true, the code was quite simple, at least for me. WYSIWYG editors are fine for given tasks but if you know HTML, writing code manually is far better! In July 2016 I decided to move everything to HTML5 and CSS3. The first step was to take some random pages and pass them thru the Nu Html Checker. Well, the result …
MLM mySQL to mySQLi migration
MLM has been fully updated to use mySQLi calls rather than mySQL. That was done during summer 2016 and fully tested during 12 months for problems. None were found so the procedure below is quite secure. If you read this and you are about to update your PHP file to use mySQLi calls the best is to prepare you work thoroughly in advance. Check which functions are used and what is the mySQLi equivalent, the name use to be the same but with a mysqli_ prefix instead of mysql_ however most function calls require more parameters to be passed and …
Comodo sha-256 certificate installed on Window production machine
Microsoft has forced all developers to use a code signing certificate that uses the SHA-256 algorithm in order for signatures to be recognized on Windows 7+, as of Jan 1 2016. See http://aka.ms/sha1 for the full details but the consequence of Microsoft’s decision means that our SHA-1 certificate that we received needed to be replaced. Today SHA-1 certificate has been replaced by new SHA-256. kSign version has been updated as well to support that new certificate. As a test MaxBulk Mailer distribution file has been built successfully! — Stan Busk – Software Engineer at www.maxprog.com
Using your own SMTP server, advantages and drawbacks
When sending e-mail you have the choice between using your ISP, your web host or your own dedicated SMTP server (An SMTP server is a mailserver that you use to send email. It stores your messages and ensures that your messages are either delivered or returned to you with a failure message). Your ISP usually will provide an SMTP mail server but most ISPs will not want you to send bulk email through their mailservers. Many have restrictions on the number of messages you can send per hour. Your web host should provide you with a dedicated SMTP server. Particularly …
Avoiding having your legitimate e-mails being flagged as SPAM
If your messages look like regular private e-mails and you use tags to make them different and customized with recipient data, you will get much better results. You can also use ‘Bonded Sender’ https://www.bondedsender.com or ‘Habeas’ https://www.habeas.com so your messages will be recognized as legitimate. Furthermore you can run your email through some of the spam filters available online, or install some end-user antispam applications on your own computer, and send an email to yourself before attempting to email end users. There are some services you can use to test the spam quotient of your e-zines and e-mail offers before …
Subscription and unsubscription handling thru regular e-mails
You just need to gather all those subscribe and unsubscribe messages to a couple of folders applying some rules and using the scripts we wrote for adding or deleting addresses from a Mac OS X Mail (or Entourage folder). They are called ‘Adding recipients from Mac OS X Mail’ and ‘Deleting recipients from Mac OS X Mail’ (we also include Entourage and Powermail scripts). Those scripts come with MaxBulk distribution, inside the example/AppleScript/Mac OS X Mail import folder and are also accessible from both the import menu and import button. They are very easy to modify if you need to …