Administrative and Maintenance Tools - [DBTech] vBMail v2 (vB4)

vBMail: What is it?
vBMail is a professional mailing list mod with Bounced Mail handling and advanced subscription management features.

Uses

vBMail is the perfect solution for any forum who wish to send out large quantities of mail to users on a mailing list. It lets admins and users have fine-grained access to subscriptions, and also automatically handles bounced mail.

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If you like this mod please hit the button to the right ---->

Please remember to click the, button to the right if you installed the mod ---->

What does 'Marking As Installed' do ?

* It helps you to stay on top of updates - members who have installed modifications will be notified by us whenever new updates are available.

* For security issues - vbulletin.org will contact all members who have installed a modification whenever a security issue is brought to their attention.

* Marking a modification as installed also helps us know how many people are using our work, giving us extra incentive to provide more features and new modifications.

We appreciate the support!
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Priority support & Product Demos available at: http://www.dragonbyte-tech.com/

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Translations available @ our forum
Support for translations handled by the translator in its respective threads only.

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Major Features:

Bounced Mail Handling: Once configured, it will (if so desired) automatically track and handle bounced mail. Alternatively, you can manually handle bounced mail if you so wish.

Automatic "Unsubscribe" Link Creation: If the user receiving the mail has access to unsubscribing, a secure link to unsubscribe themselves from the mailing list will be automatically added to the bottom of the mail. It does not require the user to be logged in, so it complies with spam policies set forth by mail providers.

Mail History: Each past sent mail can be viewed at any time from the front-end.

Advanced Subscription Management: Users can quickly and easily (un)subscribe from the mailing list via the mailing list directory, or the admin can manually change the subscription status in the AdminCP.

Bounced Mail Threshold: When an admin-configured number of mails bounce from the same email address, the user is automatically removed from mailing lists and all other email-related vBulletin features, and notified via PM what happened to their account, as well as directions to change their email addresses.

Complete Feature List (Lite)

• Mailing List Directory
  • List all mailing lists
  • Links to send mail / view mail history / (un)subscribe
  • Unsubscription stats
• Send Mail
  • Uses the full editor in vBulletin
  • Works with 4.1.4's CKEditor
  • Uses vBulletin's Mail Queue system to avoid overloading servers / avoid "maximum mails per hour" server restrictions
• Mail History
  • Displays a list of all mail from that mailing list
  • View the mail in full HTML
  • Unsubscription stats
• (Un)subscribe
  • One-click to add or remove from a mailing list
• AdminCP
  • Create unlimited mailing lists with per-list usergroup permissions
  • Create keywords for people to subscribe to
  • View list of bounced mail
  • Prune list of bounced mail
  • Permissions for who can view unsubscription stats
• Scheduled Tasks
  • Hourly collection of bounced mail
  • Hourly checks for number of bounces above the threshold

Complete Feature List (Pro)

• Send Mail
  • Subscribe to an external mailing list via the vBulletin Sidebar (vB4 only)
  • Override SMTP settings per mailing list
• AdminCP
  • Ability to create External mailing lists, powered by emails not found in vBulletin user accounts

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This mod displays a copyright notification in the footer of pages generated by this mod which includes:

• 1 Link to DragonByte Technologies homepage
• 1 Link to Product Description page of this modification

[chrisbjax]

Hi Fillip,
After some tinkering, changing the "Navbar Link" Plugin Hook location for vbmail from "global_bootstrap_complete" to "process_templates_complete" - the issue appears to have gone away.

[DragonByte Tech]

But doing so many break the Home tab, which is why I put it where I did


Fillip

[chrisbjax]

yes sir, understood.
Disclaimer - I only posted what worked for me.


Is there anyway to throttle the messages sent per hour?

[DragonByte Tech]

vBMail uses the vBulletin Mail Queue system, I'm not sure if that has this feature but if it doesn't, then neither does vBMail


Fillip

[Alan_SP]

I think that vB Mail Que system sends specified amount of mails (in settings) every page load of front end.

So people should use very low numbers there if they have very busy forums. Or higher, if on small ones.

[stemmy]

I seem to have an issue.

This system was working fine (ish) a few weeks ago.

This system did have an issue with my members subscription system. When the mail program was running and a member paid an upgrade subscription they would not be moved to the new usergroup. Not a real issue as I now leave the mail program disabled until I need to send a message and then activate it, send the message, then de activate it again.

The new issue is this - when the system sends the emails I then get the returned (bounced) emails. I have set up an IMAP email to receive the mail. This system used to work correctly. When I activated the mail program I would then go to the scheduled tasks section and run the two mail program tasks - collect mail and remove members from list. When the tasks ran it would list the members that had been removed from the list and then delete the email from the mailbox.

If I run the system now all seems to work - I get no error messages. When I hit the scheduled task it used to list the members it had removed, I now get no members names in that list, it still shows that its done what it was supposed to do but no names are listed.

If I send another message I still get loads of bounced messages - if the system was working shouldn't these member have been removed from the list already ??

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by stemmy

This system did have an issue with my members subscription system. When the mail program was running and a member paid an upgrade subscription they would not be moved to the new usergroup. Not a real issue as I now leave the mail program disabled until I need to send a message and then activate it, send the message, then de activate it again.

That issue has already been fixed a few versions ago, it was an issue with the mail_send hook.

You can check if your version is "safe" by opening /dbtech/vbmail/hooks/mail_send.php and check that the code is wrapped in

PHP Code:

if (THIS_SCRIPT != 'payment_gateway') 


Deactivating the product after sending emails means that the unsubscribe link will not work, plus many other features of the mailing list that is integral for the functionality of the mod.

Originally Posted by stemmy

The new issue is this - when the system sends the emails I then get the returned (bounced) emails. I have set up an IMAP email to receive the mail. This system used to work correctly. When I activated the mail program I would then go to the scheduled tasks section and run the two mail program tasks - collect mail and remove members from list. When the tasks ran it would list the members that had been removed from the list and then delete the email from the mailbox.

If I run the system now all seems to work - I get no error messages. When I hit the scheduled task it used to list the members it had removed, I now get no members names in that list, it still shows that its done what it was supposed to do but no names are listed.

If I send another message I still get loads of bounced messages - if the system was working shouldn't these member have been removed from the list already ??

Are you sure you don't deactivate the product before doing that? To my knowledge, nobody else are having these issues.

In addition, you should always check your Bounced Mail list (DBTech - vBMail -> Bounced Mail List -> Show Only Entries Generated By: Unknown Mail -> Submit) - cPanel will not correctly flag certain emails as bounced; example of one email is this:

Subject     Warning: message 1SBG4k-0004tb-10 delayed 24 hours
Message     This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its
recipients after more than 24 hours on the queue on server.dragonbyte-tech.com.

The message identifier is: 1SBG4k-0004tb-10
The date of the message is: Sat, 24 Mar 2012 01:47:26 +0000
The subject of the message is: Update Galore: vBShout / vBAvatars (+Lite) / vBMail / vBArcade / vBAnalytics / vBNominate

The address to which the message has not yet been delivered is:

kortton+gaiffibre@gmail.com
Delay reason: SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO::
host alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [173.194.70.26]:
452-4.2.2 The email account that you tried to reach is over quota. Please direct
452-4.2.2 the recipient to
452 4.2.2 http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answer=6558 7si7316708wel.122

No action is required on your part. Delivery attempts will continue for
some time, and this warning may be repeated at intervals if the message
remains undelivered. Eventually the mail delivery software will give up,
and when that happens, the message will be returned to you.

As it's showing as coming from

Mailer-Daemon@server.dragonbyte-tech.com

instead of the actual email address seen in the email itself.

There is nothing vBMail can do about that, as it's not feasible to try to detect an email address from the error message - there may be multiple matches in these error messages, leading to confusion.

These emails will still show up as Bounced, but the users won't be flagged - thus explaining your issue.

You can fix it by going to the list I suggested, then editing each email taking the email from the message body and putting it in the field that has

Mailer-Daemon@server.dragonbyte-tech.com

in it, setting Is Bounced Mail to Yes, then saving the message.

Repeat for each email, then run the 2nd scheduled task again. It will then function correctly


Fillip

[KGodel]

When attemtping to add a new mailing list, I receive this error:

Database error in vBulletin 4.1.11:

Invalid SQL:

SELECT `bitfield`
FROM `mytablehere`
ORDER BY `bitfield` DESC
LIMIT 1;

MySQL Error : Unknown column 'bitfield' in 'field list'
Error Number : 1054

[Pandemikk]

Originally Posted by KGodel

When attemtping to add a new mailing list, I receive this error:

Please don't remove the table and column names. That makes it virtually impossible to fix.

[snowlion]

This is full message

Database error in vBulletin 4.1.4:

Invalid SQL:

                                SELECT `bitfield`
                                FROM `sty_dbtech_vbmail_mailinglist`
                                ORDER BY `bitfield` DESC
                                LIMIT 1;

MySQL Error   : Unknown column 'bitfield' in 'field list'
Error Number  : 1054
Request Date  : Thursday, March 29th 2012 @ 12:46:16 AM
Error Date    : Thursday, March 29th 2012 @ 12:46:17 AM
Script        : http://forum.bentinhyeu.info/.../vbmail.php?do=mailinglist
Referrer      : http://forum.bentinhyeu.info/.../vbmail.php?do=mailinglist
IP Address    : ...
Username      : kisibachda
Classname     : vB_Database
MySQL Version : 5.1.56