stanbusk said:
Unfortunately, there is an issue with conditionals which only work if entered in the pop up window. You cannot just type in the relevant code....
Conditionals are plain text actually. They don't use anything else that regular text HOWEVER you have to make sure the comparing tag has double brackets and values are surrounded with standard quotes. There are chances that as you type " the system will replace it with “ and ”. This is a known 'problem'. Note that after the system replace the quotes and you finished entering the conditional, you can go back and replace all “ and ” with ". Hopefully a fix is on the way
Ok, zoomed in the screen large enough to be able to detect the difference and as you say, the quotes were being 'adjusted'. Once I corrected that, it all worked as it should, even when just typed in directly. Thanks for that, the manual needs to make this clear.
And then there's the emails that are apparently sent, but go missing along the way and never reach their intended destination...
This is something that happens on your server, indeed. I wrote a FAQ entry about that:
My message never arrives despite MaxBulk Mailer says it was delivered. Anyway I recommend you to compare the message headers. In MaxBulk Mailer preferences, last panel, do you have any custom header? If you use MLM have you tried to deactivate it? There is a reason for your server to behave that way.
The only Headers used are From, To and Reply To. No custom headers. I need to look into this as it's been a problem without noticing emails were going missing.
But what is it about an email sent by MBM that is different from one I create in my email client (Apple's Mail.app) and send with the same headers, subject and content, but which DOES reach the destination?
Finally there's the irritation of MBM preventing me from entering a perfectly valid email address to send 'Test' messages. As I've said elsewhere, a valid email address can be just the username, no '@' and no '.'. Stop preventing me from using that. If you must do anything, just display a warning that the entered address might not be valid, but LET THE USER DECIDE. I know better than any developer what I can and can't do and if I make a mistake, tough. My problem. Just don't enforce your misguided and inappropriate address checking. DON'T DO IT.
I don't understand what you are talking about. Can you explain?
OK, when in 'Test' mode and you 'Send', a dialog pops up and asks for an email address to which the test email(s) should be sent. There is a pop-up menu of options to choose which recipients for whom to prepare the messages and below that a single line text entry box in which to type the (envelope) address. For testing purposes, I want to send to my local account on my (SMTP, IMAP etc) server, so it never leaves the network and I can check it immediately and/or see if there's any obvious delivery problem. It's a good way to test. Well, it would be if I was able to enter my local email address, which is simply "ken". The account is on that server and obviously the same domain, so having no domain part of the address simply instructs the mail server that this is a local address. There is no need of any @, or domainname or '.'s and in fact they prevent it from working. I need to enter "ken". You may not be aware of the origins of email, but that's how it has always worked and should still work. But developers (yourself included obviously) have taken to trying to FORCE the user to enter an address in the format that they (the developer) think is correct. But their ignorance of how email was designed and is supposed to work means that often now there are checking routines applied to email address entry that don't allow these short local addresses to be entered. So for the sake of preventing a user from possibly entering something not entirely correct (which they'd soon spot in any case) you are now NOT ALLOWING users to actually use the addresses they may need. Perfectly legal and valid addresses in the world of proper email.
So as I said, DON"T DO IT. Let the user decide what they want to enter as the address and don't mess with it. There is no need. It's symptomatic of modern app development that there's this trend to try and mollycoddle the user. Ooh, mustn't let them type the wrong thing must we. WHY NOT? People need to be allowed to make their own mistakes. It wouldn't be so bad if that was the only problem, but the fact is that the ignorance of the developers actually prevents the use of perfectly valid addresses.
Actually, I could in fact use "ken@home" as that works. But MBM won't allow me to use even that. This is unutterably and monstrously annoying.
So please, politely, can you remove the address checking in this pop-up so that we can actually enter whatever email address we choose. That is the right and proper way to do it. Hey, if you must, have a preference option to check email addresses or not. But you must somehow allow the user to enter any address they want to try to use.
