Greetings all

Justin, I think all of your ideas are fantastic, but I worry that Dada Mail will start to "progress" past the point of being strong at what it's intended to be I don't want to sound like I'm trying to limit progress, but I think in choosing projects to implement and new features to include, I would recommend taking the heart and intent of the program and choosing projects that are in keeping with the focus of the program

I firmly believe that Dada Mail is the best at what it does in the field of mass mailing programs I caution being careful of adding features just because they "sound cool" With this in mind, I think the following are excellent candidates for improvements or additions to the program:

1. Increased management of user accounts
2. Increase management of the moderation system
3. Better functionality in the Dada Bridge program
4. More SQL backend support for improved stability and speed
5. Mass mailing enhancements
6. FCK addition, or another RTE bundled with the program (though I think this might not be as important right now)
7. SOAP Server/Client API I'm not a programmer, but improving this feature should allow other developers to create "third-party additions" that might take the burden off of you in adding new features in the future If an addition becomes popular enough and is stable enough, it might be able to be rolled into the core of the program itself It would also free you up to focus more on the stability and security of the core system itself

I would also suggest to you, based on what I've seen people requesting from mail programs, to add a sort of auto-response feature I'm not an email guru nor am I very knowledgeable in commercial applications on the web, so I don't know if this feature is already a part of the system, but something like this might be very helpful to other users Something that will pool email addresses and upon registering for the site, or an email list, sending said email an auto response that is not "the last email sent to the list"

I hope I made at least a molecule of sense Again, I love what you are doing and your dedication to the community If I had the funds, I would TOTALLY fund this entire project for a month! Unfortunately, I can't even afford a subscription renewal right now sigh

Keep up the great work This is one of my favorite programs I use

~regards,

Michael Sagaser Information & Computer Technology East Carolina University

Justin J wrote: >

Hello Everyone,

I've recently branched the Dada Mail trunk, and I have a bug-fixes branch, as well as the main feature enhancements trunk to work with

I'm also getting itchy to work on some new features within Dada Mail and I'm currently wondering which features to include

I'd like to add features, based on what's the most popular to the users of Dada Mail - in other words, give the people who use Dada Mail a choice of what features I add in User-contributed features for Dada Mail are non-existent

I was thinking of doing this by simply creating an online poll/voting area, where you can all add your 02

I also was thinking of setting up another fundraiser, so that I have a little bit of incentive to work on the features and also an open window in which to do the work in I hope everyone realizes it's very hard to release major features, while working on said features for nothing If I have the funds to work on some of the features I'm about to list for a month full time or half time, we'd see a whole lot of progress, pretty darn quickly

What I'd love to have happen is have the fundraiser be a success and work on the most popular feature, until it's in a good state and then work on, the next most popular feature, until I'm out of time or features

I'd like to give potential doners some sort of extra incentive on donating to these new features - other than a Dada Mail t-shirt, or some sort of Pro Dada subscription, I'm out of ideas on what you guys/gals would like

Below is a list of some of the features I'd personally like to see in Dada Mail If culled this list from my personal to-do list and the feature requests tracker I'm asking for comments on every part of this, from the features included here, to the, "take a vote" idea, to setting up a fundraiser to help offset the costs, to any sort of incentive to would-be doners

Thanks a lot for any feedback (reply to this post is just fine)

-- Justin

User-Editable Fields Currently, Dada Mail supports adding/editing/deleting of arbitrary subscriber fields

It also supports the list owner in editing the subscriber information

Dada Mail currently does not support the actual user to edit it's own subscriber information and we'd like to add that feature into Dada Mail

This would also mean we'd have to overhaul the session management part of Dada Mail to not only support admin sessions for the list owner, but to also support sessions for individual users

The upside to overhauling that feature is that it allows us to have features that may require a user to be logged in, such as password protected archives and various other features - not just user-editable subscriber fields

Dada Bridge: Rules Currently, Dada Bridge isn't completely flexible on letting you specify arbitrary and complex rules when it comes to the email messages it handles

We'd like to add in Mail Rules, similiar to Apple's Mail app application, where you can have Dada Bridge look for specific criteria in messages it receives (who, specifically it's from, specific text it may have, if the message contains attachments) and, depending on the criteria met, have Dada Bridge to something specific to the message (broadcast to the list, reject, flag it for moderation, strip out attachments, forward to another address, etc)

Dada Bridge Moderation Enhancements Currently, the moderation system is slightly less than rough It works, but is a little kludgey We'd like to make it much more easy to use, extendable and convenient

Currently, The options for moderation look something like this:

[ ] Use Moderation Messages sent to your discussion list will have to be approved by the List Owner

[ ] Send a Rejection Message The original poster will receive a message stating that the message was rejected Fairly spartan

We'd like to extend the functionality to include:

[ ] Use Moderation Messages sent to your discussion list will have to be approved Send moderation accept/reject messages to: [ ] the list owner (recommended) [ ] A separate Moderation list ( View/Add ) [ ] A random pool of subscribers Randomly pick [-- 5 --] Subscribers to moderate [ ] Moderate messages sent by non-subscribers [ ] Allow moderator list to send messages to the entire list [ ] Send messages sent by a moderator to all moderators [ ] Send a Message Received Confirmation Message The original poster will receive a message stating that the message has been received, but need moderating [ ] Send an Acceptance Message The original poster will receive a message stating that the message was accepted [ ] Send a Rejection Message The original poster will receive a message stating that the message was rejected All these features should take off much of the burden of moderating from the list owner and spread it to specific moderators, as well as being able to opt for a self-moderating list

Mass Mailing: Batch Settings Enhancements Currently, Dada Mail's batch settings work by sending the specified amount of messages, and then waiting the specified amount of time It can then only be estimated how long a mailing could take

This leads to a lot of confustion as people find that sending one message could take a few seconds, and their mailing time is much longer than expected

It seems like a small feature, but it would be wonderful to be able to tell Dada, Hey, if we're not sending up to the allowable limit, let's skip the next, ''x rest periods, until we're back on track

It would also be nice to bring back batch notifications via email in some way/shape or form

Bundle FCKeditor within Dada Mail It may be possible to somehow bundle FCKeditor within Dada Mail, for a installation-free support

Smart Groups/Save Partial Sending Options Being able to save a set of your subscribers, based on a saved query of your subscriber fields would be incredibly helpful to help keep track of various activities of your mailing list

SOAP Server/Client API Currently, it's not very easy to work with a Dada Mail mailing list from an outside application A SOAP API will allow a platform and language neutral way to access part of the Dada Mail API

Some major subsets of the Dada MAil API that could be useful in the SOAP API include administration duties, such as Sending a List Message, adding subscribers en-mass, import/exporting a subscription list and handling archived messages

The SOAP API could also be useful to add features of Dada Mail into your own application that deal with individual users, such as validating a subscription and subscribing/unsubscribing a subscriber

We're hoping to work on the server-side part of this, with a fully documented API and hopefully, a very simple client example

SQL backend for Mailing Monitor The Mailing Monitor keeps track of your Mass Mailings It's fairly complex and it's backend is created simply using the filesytem - it's a bunch of files and directories

In the name of performance and stability, we'd love to port this to an SQL backend No new features would initially be added, but the added stability of the SQL backend should help things, such as corrupted mass mailings, given that we have very interesting tools, such as table/row locking and transaction support in the various SQL backends

Envelope Sending Envelope sending allows you to send one message to a specific domain that will go to more than one user of that domain

This allows you to send out a mailing list message to your entire subscriber list very fast, since you could, in theory, only have to send a tenth of the messages you currently do now This would cut down your sending time also by a tenth of what it would currently take

The downside of envelope sending is that you would lose absolutely all your mail merging capabilities and each message would have to be generic This comprimise may be worth it, if raw speed is important to you If you have a discussion list, the mail merging capabilities may just be a moot feature anyways

Click through Tracking Enhancements The Click through Tracker plugin currently tracks the following:

• How many times certain urls are clicked on in your list messages
• How many times a message is opened
• How many subscribers are present every time a message is sent
• ``Hard'' email Bounces

We'd like to extend the tracking to include Subscriptions and Unsubscriptions

We would also like to have the addition of graphing features in Dada Mail, so you can graph the data that's saved in the clickthrough tracker logs in practically any way you'd like