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