Hi Justin

This sounds like a fantastic idea.

We've been using Dada for over 4 years now, run campaigns for amazing brands, and have a great list of things that we'd like to add and to be honest can probably fund a good part of this project to make the project a success and Dada into the project our clients and the broader Dada users are now asking for.

Let me put together a list of feature requests from our team and our clients and I'll email it over to you separately for a sanity check and then share with the broader development team.

I hope your cycle ride around Europe was a success, we hope you got the few pennys we sent you to buy some Croissants :-), and the way Dada is developed is really in tune with the way we are doing all the rest of our development so are happy to support this as far as we can.

Kindest regards

Alex
--

Skywire | www.skywire.co.uk
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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.

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