Hello Everyone,

The beta1 of v4 5 0 is ready to be tested Essentially, this version of Dada Mail includes the new Tracker plugin and has some minor bug fixes

Here's the download link: https://github com/downloads/justingit/dada-mail/dada-4_5_0-beta1 tar gz

and this version's specific install instructions:

http://dadamailproject
com/support/documentation-4_5_0-beta1/install_dada_mail
pod
html

And uncompress_dada cgi script:

https://github
com/justingit/dada-mail/raw/v4_5_0_beta1-2011_05_09/uncompress_dada
cgi

Here's two screenshots of the Tracker plugin, the first show the default screen, with the reports/charts/graphs for a Birds Eye View of things that are happening:

http://dadamailproject
com/images/v4_5_0/tracker_index
jpg

And a screenshot of the Tracker with an individual message:

http://dadamailproject
com/images/v4_5_0/tracker_message
jpg

Below is the current docs for the new Tracker plugin - you may also read it here:

http://dadamailproject
com/support/documentation-4_5_0-beta1/tracker
cgi
html

I'll be happy to field any questions you may have - your feedback has already been invaluable!

Tracker - tracker cgi The Tracker plugin creates fancy reports of the activity and the link clickthroughs from your mass mailing messages You can think of a mass mailing being a "campaign" if you'd like

The activities that are logged and reported include:

• subscribers when a mass mailing was sent out

• of recorded clickthroughs

• of recorded opens/views

• bounces, both soft and hard

Birds-Eye View These fancy reports include the above information in tabular data, as well as in a line graph, for all mass mailings at once to help you spot general trends This information can also be exported into csv files, giving you more flexibility for specific to your needs

The Tracker also displays a pie chart showing the breakdown of your current subscribers based on their domain

Individual Messages/Campaigns Along with the birds-eye view of seeing data of many messages at once, each mass mailing/campaign can also be explored

• Clickthroughs are broken down per # of clicks per link

• Clickthroughs are also broken down by country of origin, displayed in both a table and map

• Opens are also broken down by country of origin and displayed both in a table and map

• Bounces, both soft and hard bounces are listed by date and email address of the bouncee Clicking on the email address will allow you to view the data about the bounced message itself in the bounce handler plugin

  Just to make clear, no bounces will be recorded, unless you've separately set up and installed the bounce handler plugin that comes with Dada Mail (called Mystery Girl/dada_bounce_handler pl)

  If you suddenly get a ton of bounced messages for a mailing from addresses you know look legitimate, there's a good chance that something seriously went wrong in the delivery part of a mass mailing The reports that the Tracker plugin links to may help in resolving this problem

All this message-specific data can also be exported via csv files that may be downloaded

Installing tracker cgi The tracker cgi plugin comes with Dada Mail You'll find it in the, dada/plugins directory with the file name, tracker cgi

Change its permission to, 755

List Control Panel Menu Now, edit your " dada_config" file, so that it shows the Tracker in the left-hand menu, under the, Plugins heading:

First, see if the following lines are present in your " dada_config" file:

# start cut for list control panel menu =cut

=cut # end cut for list control panel menu

If they are, remove them

Then, find these lines:

# {-Title => 'Tracker', # -Title_URL => $PLUGIN_URL "/tracker cgi", # -Function => 'tracker', # -Activated => 1, # },

Uncomment the lines, by taking off the, "#"'s:

                                    {-Title      => 'Tracker',
                                     -Title_URL  => $PLUGIN_URL
"/tracker
cgi",
                                     -Function   => 'tracker',
                                     -Activated  => 1,
                                    },

Save your " dada_config" file

Using tracker cgi For the most part, the Tracker plugin simply reports data that's collected about your mass mailings

Preferences You may enabled/disable any of the items it does track independently in the plugin's Preferences

Enable Clickthrough Tracking When enabled, allows you to use the Redirect Tags to track links that are clicked on, in your mass mailing message

Clickthrough Track All Message Links When enabled, ALL links found in an email message will be tracked by converting them into redirect tags and then clickthrough-tracked links

Enable Open Messages Logging When enabled, allows you to track open/viewing of messages Will only work with HTML messages and only if your subscribers individualy allow images to be shown in email messages they receive

Enable Subscriber Count Logging WHen enabled, tracks how many subscribers are on your mailing list when each mass mailing goes out

Enable Bounce Logging When enabled, any bounces, both soft or hard, are tallyed up You will need to have the bounce handler installed for this to work

Clean Up Tracker Reports When enabled, tries to get rid of a lot of the, "line noise" that could be present in your logs, because of weird logging behaviour

This will also remove opens/clickthroughs and even bounces from test messages, so if you are sending a test message and you want to test out if the clickthrough URLs are working, etc, disable this preference, send your test messages and enable it, after you're done

Clickthroughs Clickthroughs are tracked by creating a "Redirect" tag, that holds the URL you want to track

Sounds difficult, so let's break it down

If you have a PlainText message you want to send and you want to track who clicks on a specific link, say,

http://example com

You would write this URL inside a redirect tag, like this:

http://example com

Replace, "http://example com" with whatever URL you would like to track

This redirect tag will be replaced by Dada Mail with a URL that, when clicked, will record the click and redirect your user to the URL you specified within the tag

In an HTML message, you would craft the redirect tag the same way, except that the redirect tag goes within the, "href" paramater of the, "a" tag Again, this sounds difficult, but for example:

If you have a link created like this:

    <a href="http://example
com">
     Go to my Example site!
    </a>

You would simply, like before replace,

http://example com

with the redirect tag,

http://example com

and put this inside the href parameter, like this:

Go to my Example site!

If you have messages where you want to track many, many links and the above sounds tedious and easy to mess up, or your authoring workflow doesn't play nice with these redirect tags, there is an option in preferences labeled,

Clickthrough Track All Message Links

Which will do all this for you, automatically Any links that you have manually added a redirect tag to will be untouched, justin case

Backwards Compatibility with the [redirect=] tag Past versions of Dada Mail (before v4 5 0) used a different syntax for redirect URLs It looked like this:

[redirect=http://example com]

This tag format is still supported, but consider it deprecated

Clickthrough Tags and WYSIWYG editors (FCKeditor/CKeditor) In-browser WYSIWYG editors, like FCKeditor and CKeditor have a hard time working with Dada Mail's redirect tags, and will corrupt the tags by turning many of the characters into their entities, like this:

    <a href="&lt;?dada redirect url=&quot;http://example
com&quot; ?&gt;">
     Go to my Example site!
    </a>

If you use FCKeditor or CKeditor with Dada Mail, we suggest using the, Clickthrough Track All Message Links option in Dada Mail, or disable FCKeditor/CKeditor Copying and pasting HTML from a separate program which does not corrupt the tag (like Dreamweaver), will still be affected, if you simply paste the HTML into FCKeditor/CKeditor, even if you do it into the HTML Source

For most other Desktop-based WYSIWYG editors, including Dreamweaver, double-check that the editor does not corrupt the redirect tag

Limitations of Redirect tags One thing that you cannot do with the redirect tags, is embedd other Dada Mail Template Tags within the redirect tag

This will not work:

http://example com/index html?email=

Capturing Additional Paramaters with Redirect Tags It is possible to capture and log additional paramaters in the redirect tags, besides the URL clicked on For example, you craft a redirect tag, like this:

http://example com

Where, "custom_param" is the additional paramater you'd like to capture and, "some value" is the value you'd like to save The value can be different for different links, in different messages, etc

Treat this feature as experimental The Tracker plugin will not display additional paramater data, but the data can be found in the downloadable csv files created by the Tracker Plugin

Before using your additional paramaters, make sure both the "dada_clickthrough_urls" and "dada_clickthrough_url_log" tables both hold a column named the same as this paramater

In our above example, the following SQL will do the job:

    ALTER TABLE dada_clickthrough_urls    ADD custom_param TEXT;
    ALTER TABLE dada_clickthrough_url_log ADD custom_param TEXT;

Open Message Logging Open Message Logging allows you to keep count of how many times a message is viewed by your subscribers

Limitations of Open Message Logging Open Message Logging will only work with HTML messages, since the Open Message logger works simply by embedding a small image within your message and counting how many times this images is requested

Open Message Logging will also only work if your subscribers allow images to be displayed within an HTML message

Because of this, one should never look at the logged open messages and the subscriber count and make a precise observation over the "impact" of your message (how many people are looking at it) but simply gleam a general trend of your messages; are they reaching people, is the general amount of logged opens increasing, decreasing or staying the same? That sort of thing

Subscriber Count Logging Subscriber Count Logging simply records how many subscribers are on your mailing list, at the time a mass mailing goes out

Specific Plugin Config Variables These variables have defaults saved in this plugin itself, but encourage you to reset the defaults to the values you may want, instead in your " dada_config" file, in the, $PLUGIN_CONFIGS variable, under the, "Tracker" entry

Plugin_Name The name of this plugin

Plugin_URL The URL of this plugin This is usually found by default, but sometimes the default doesn't work correctly If this happens to you, fill it out in this variable

Geo_IP_Db This variable holds the file path to the location ofthe GeoIP database The GeoIP database is a IP Address -> Location lookup table, to quickly and easily figure out the location based on the IP Address

This database is updated monthly and new copies can be obtained at:

The database is licensed under the LGPL, so it's OK to ship Dada Mail with a copy of this database

If you find it necessary, you may keep a copy of this database outside of Dada Mail and update it regularly and tell this plugin where to find the database to use

For more information, see:

http://search cpan org/~borisz/Geo-IP-PurePerl-1 25/lib/Geo/IP/PurePerl pm

This product includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind, available "/www maxmind com/" in from http:

Compatibility with clickthrough_tracking cgi The previous iteration of this plugin (tracker cgi) was called, clickthrough_tracker cgi Do not use this old plugin with anything newer than v4 5 0 of Dada Mail It will not work correctly

Upgrade Notes Most likely, you will need to update your $ADMIN_MENU and change over the Clickthrough Tracker entry with the new Tracker entry The piece of code to look for, within the $ADMIN_MENU variable looks like this:

                                    {-Title      => 'Clickthrough Tracking',
                                     -Title_URL  => $PLUGIN_URL
"/clickthrough_tracking
cgi",
                                     -Function   => 'clickthrough_tracking',
                                     -Activated  => 1,
                                    },

You will want to change it to:

                                    {-Title      => 'Tracker',
                                     -Title_URL  => $PLUGIN_URL
"/tracker
cgi",
                                     -Function   => 'tracker',
                                     -Activated  => 1,
                                    },

So as not to break everyone's current installations when upgrading and cause less of a hassle, a simple compatibility script called, clickthrough_tracking cgi is currently included with this distribution so the old $ADMIN_MENU entry will continue to work

The tracker cgi plugin comes with support for all the backends of Dada Mail: PlainText, MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite The clickthrough_tracking cgi plugin only supported the PlainText backend for all the logs

If you run Dada Mail with the Default backend of Dada Mail, are wanting to upgrade, there's really nothing you have to do, as the PlainText log formats of clickthrough_tracking cgi and tracker cgi are exactly the same One notable difference between the PlainText and SQL backends is that no IP address data is saved in the PlainText backend

If you run Dada Mail with one of the SQL backends, the required additional SQL tables will be created automatically for you upon your first run of Dada Mail - no upgrade scripts will be needed If you want to create these tables manually, do so before upgrading The tables to create are called, "dada_mass_mailing_event_log" and, "dada_clickthrough_url_log"

See the appropriate schema files in, dada/extras/SQL for the exact SQL query to use

Importing Old Clickthrough Logs Data saved within the older, PlainText clickthrough logs would have to be moved over,

There is a script called, dada_clickthrough_plaintext2sql pl located in the, dada/extras/scripts directory that will do this conversion Move it into your, dada directory, change its permissions to, 755 and run it once in your web browser It may take a few minutes to run to completion

COPYRIGHT Copyright (c) 1999 - 2011 Justin Simoni All rights reserved

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE See the GNU General Public License for more details

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc , 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA