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

[kameraderie]

It will be cool to use this with a feature to send automatic Private Message notification to each users

[Alfa1]

Very nice to see somethign like this.

How does this addon decide which bounces to act upon? Is it only the number of bounces or does this actually check why an email is bouncing? Even if thats just for email delayed, inbox full and other trivial bounces?

What effect do bounces have on other vbulletin emails to the user? (birthdays, notifications, member email, etc, etc.) If it doesn't affect this, then it only decreases bounced email problems, but doesnt resolve it. Websites would still get blacklisted as spammers if email is still sent to inactive email accounts.

[mokonzi]

vBMail has a threshold feature, meaning an email address can bounce x amount of times before it will be unsubscribed. It uses the standard bounce header to control what it classes as 'real' bounces, but also (as it uses an IMAP email address) list all emails coming to the bounce email address and allows you to manually mark it as 'bounced' mail (for example mailbox full problems don't count as a bounced mail, but you could set it to bounced after the 72 hours mail that often comes).

Once it's marked a user as bounced and processed them (by hourly cron jobs) it then unsubscribes them from all mail lists AND turns off all the email related features within vB's standard install (I'm not sure how it would fare with any non DBTech mod's email features atm).

[DragonByte Tech]

1.0.2 Beta 3:
* Fixed a critical security issue regarding guest permissions

Fillip

[Ocean-Wonders]

Can you import a mailing list into it i.e a mailing list generated by vb ?

[TheLastSuperman]

[high]* TheLastSuperman tags [/high]

[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by Ocean-Wonders

Can you import a mailing list into it i.e a mailing list generated by vb ?

Not yet, in the future we will be looking to adding support for more types of mailing lists, and that's when we'll be looking at importers


Fillip

[Alfa1]

Originally Posted by mokonzi

vBMail has a threshold feature, meaning an email address can bounce x amount of times before it will be unsubscribed. It uses the standard bounce header to control what it classes as 'real' bounces, but also (as it uses an IMAP email address) list all emails coming to the bounce email address and allows you to manually mark it as 'bounced' mail (for example mailbox full problems don't count as a bounced mail, but you could set it to bounced after the 72 hours mail that often comes).

Once it's marked a user as bounced and processed them (by hourly cron jobs) it then unsubscribes them from all mail lists AND turns off all the email related features within vB's standard install (I'm not sure how it would fare with any non DBTech mod's email features atm).

Thanks Mokonzi. Thats very helpful. Could you elaborate on how it use the bounce header to define a bounce? Does it look for certain phrases? Many bounce headers do not have useful information anymore these days and many email providers use their own system/way to alert about bounced email.

Once vbmail marks a user as having an invalid email account, then is there a possibility for the admin to restrict the account? Such accounts are mainly from inactive users or from spammers / trolls.
My site benefited greatly from restricting accounts with inactive email addresses. Spam and trolling went down drastically.

[doopz]

Great! Will be testing this out later this week

[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by Alfa1

Thanks Mokonzi. Thats very helpful. Could you elaborate on how it use the bounce header to define a bounce? Does it look for certain phrases? Many bounce headers do not have useful information anymore these days and many email providers use their own system/way to alert about bounced email.

The most common form of bounced mail is one that sends back all the headers that were sent with the original mail.

vBMail adds a specific header which it then checks for in the bounced mail body. If found, it does some validation checks, and if it's valid it flags it as a bounced mail.

Those bounces that do not follow this standard are either discarded (Automatic mode) or flagged as Unknown Mail (Manual mode).

For maximum "cleanliness" you would set it to Manual mode, then manually edit each mail that did not follow the aforementioned standard, ensuring the mail address is correct (for instance, mails that have been delayed 24/48/72 hours will show as originating from Mailer-Daemon@yourdomain.com instead of the bouncee) and setting the bounce flag to yes.

Originally Posted by Alfa1

Once vbmail marks a user as having an invalid email account, then is there a possibility for the admin to restrict the account? Such accounts are mainly from inactive users or from spammers / trolls.
My site benefited greatly from restricting accounts with inactive email addresses. Spam and trolling went down drastically.

That is not currently possible, due to the fact that there's a chance for false positives (i.e. people using their own domain name's emails, and their site had a temporary problem, or their data center has issues receiving mails from any IP from another data center - this is a real concern, we had this exact issue with Mokonzi himself over there) which would have an adverse effect on a forum.


Fillip