2-column newsletter template (available in both Grey & Green)

(Click to enlarge)

1-column newsletter template (also available in both Grey & Green)

Also included in this release:

Fix: Merged fields not being replaced by empty external group fields
Fix: Unable to load the default new group structure in Spanish release
Fix: External excel groups do not return date fields for the AddDate field naming
Fix: Incorrect default SMTP Port value for the manually created email account

If the Upgrade Protection on your license is expired and you want to download this update, you can renew the Upgrade Protection on your license by clicking the Extend Cover button in the GroupMail Customers Area.

In the Message Editor in GroupMail, right-click on the Image that you have inserted into your Message then go Image Properties.

Under Image Options, Hyperlink:  From the drop down menu select http://
Next enter the URL that you want this Hyperlink to go to.

In this example I have entered http://group-mail.com (you need to enter the URL that you wish to open when someone clicks on this image here please).

* When your message is received and someone clicks on this Image it will bring them to the URL that you have entered above.

** It’s a good idea to get in the habit of adding some alternate text to images as well. This way, if an email client blocks an image for some reason, the descriptive text for the image will still show in the message.

Another method of doing this is via the Insert Menu on the Message Editor, Hyperlink Menu option and then following the same steps.

As always, if you have any questions or need some help along the way, don’t hesitate to contact our technical support team

How to create a newsletter opt-in form for your website.

Now the next step is getting that subscription information into your GroupMail Newsletter Groups.

In order for GroupMail Subscriber to process requests of this type, it needs to connect to your Email account and process messages with the subject line of Subscription Details.

To do this, start the Subscriber Add-on by clicking on the button on the GroupMail Add-ons toolbar.

When the Subscriber Add-on opens, right-click the Pop3 Email Accounts in the navigation menu on the left-hand pane of the work space and choose New Account.

This will bring up the Account Properties. Enter the Account Name, POP3 server address, Username and password appropriate to the email account and click on OK to complete the account configuration. There are additional settings available under the Security Settings and Message Options tabs, however the default values work for the majority of configurations.

Now in the navigation panel, highlight the account name just configured (My Newsletter in this case).

Then, in the workspace click New to show the Create a New Rule screen as shown below.

We now need to configure a rule for this account that will recognize all messages that are subscription requests (i.e. have a subject line equal to Subscription Details).

Set the Name of the rule and description as appropriate, and choose OK to complete the rule configuration.

In the navigation pane, we now have an account set up under My Newsletter; this allows Subscriber to process messages in this email account.

Setup the Subscribe Action

We now need to configure an Action to process the information in the Email message(s) and store them in our newsletter group.

Highlight the rule My Newsletter Rule in the navigation pane and press the New button in the workspace to create a new action associated with this rule.

The Subscribe type is selected by default, choose Next to proceed.

Select the Group that the recipient is to be added to (In this case “Website Newsletter Group”), choose where the email address is contained in the email message, in this case it is in the Body of the Email Message, and choose Next to proceed to the next step.

(We have the option to enable Double Opt-In support, however this is not a requirement in this scenario, so choose Next to proceed.)

In this case there are two recipient details that we need to extract from the message body, the Name, and the Email address. To parse (extract) these, enable the checkbox Parse Recipient Details from Message Bodyas shown below.

First off we will extract the Name of the recipient, so choose New to display the Parsing Wizard screen below.

In the Start From dropdown, select from Top of Message Body and type Name: in the After the Token Text option as shown in Figure 23.

This tells subscriber to start from the top of the message body and read the name of the prospect after locating the Name: text.

Choose Next to continue.

The recipient name is contained in the message after the Name: text to the end of the line, so select this option and Next to continue as shown in Figure 24.

Choose the Text and/or Numbers option and select Next to continue.

Finally, enter a descriptive name for the data being extracted, and select the group field to store the data, choose Save to complete the configuration of parsing the recipient name.

In order to extract the remaining data from the email, choose New and configure the parsing details for each of the remaining pieces of recipient data (i.e. Email Address)

Once completed there are 2 parse fields as follows:

Choose Next to proceed.

To send the recipient a confirmation message once they have been added to the group, click the … button in theSend Subscription Confirmation Message section.

Choose New to create the message.

Select the appropriate group in the Send To dropdown list, this ensures that the appropriate merge fields are present on the Insert -> Merge Fields menu.

Enter an appropriate subject line and compose the confirmation message, when complete Save the message and close the message editor.

The Subscription Confirmation message has now been added to the list, choose OK to continue.

This completes the configuration of these subscription requests. Choose OK to return to the main Subscriber screen.

We now have a POP3 email account My Newsletter which connects to messages sent to the email xyz@infacta.com address. There is one rule My Newsletter Rule which recognizes emails received with our predefined subject line Subscription Details.

For each email received with this subject line, Subscriber will parse the recipient details from the email message, and add these to the Website Newsletter Group and also send a confirmation message to the recipient.

Process Emails in the Account

To process the email messages in this account, click on the Process Now button on the Subscriber Add-On toolbar.

Click the Process Now button as shown below.

While the process is running, an icon is displayed in the system tray. Clicking the History button on the toolbar displays the statistics for the account processing.

Absolutely! If you are using the GroupMail Business Edition you can link to a shared group on a Network Folder.

Go to Groups, New Group.

Select the first option “GroupMail Format (Default) – Recipients are stored internally“, Next.

To link to an existing Group, which is stored on a Shared Network Folder, choose the Option “Link to an existing Group“. Next.

Press the Browse button to go to the location of this shared group.

Finally, all that’s left to do is to select the group in the list of available Shared Groups and then press the “Link To Group” button.

Congratulations! You have now successfully linked to a Shared Group on a Network Folder.

As always, if you have any questions or need some help along the way, don’t hesitate to contact our technical support team.

Customers often ask if they can Share their GroupMail Groups on a Network Folder?

The answer is Yes, you can do this with the GroupMail Business Edition.

To Create a Shared Group, go to Groups, New Group.

Select the first option “GroupMail Format (Default) – Recipients are stored internally“.  Next.

By selecting “Custom – Specify the location where the new Group is to be saved“, this allows you to select the Network Folder where you wish to save this Group.  When you press the “Select” Button, you can browse to the Location where you wish to store this Shared Group on your Network.

You can select the Folder and press Ok. Then Next.

Once you have specified the Fields you want in your Group, press Next.

Select the Field that contains the Email Address and the Date the Recipient is added to your Group. Next.

Now all that’s left is to give this Group a Name and press Create!

Congratulations! You have now created a Shared Group. Now, other GroupMail users can link to that shared group too. This way, all users are working from the same mailing list(s).

If you have any questions or need some help along the way, don’t hesitate to contact our technical support team.

YES, it certainly can!

The Subscriber Add-on allows you to automatically remove invalid, undeliverable or bounced email addresses from your mailing list. It does this by checking your incoming mail server for emails returned by recipient mail servers based on their subject lines and then extracting the email addresses from the bounced messages and either;

1. excluding these addresses from future mailings, or
2. removing the recipients from the Group(s) altogether based on the actions that you configure, or
3. a Stored Procedure can be specified to handle the bounced messages.

When an email to a recipient bounces back to you, it is not always desirable to remove it from your mailing list immediately. The message may have been returned because of a temporary problem (i.e. mailbox full, mail server/internet connectivity downtime, etc.)

With this in mind, Subscriber allows you to specify the number of bounced messages that need to occur before the recipient is excluded or deleted; giving you complete control over your bounce management strategy.

There are a number of Bounce Rules pre-installed in Subscriber which will identify the majority of bounced messages that are returned from mail servers. The bounces are generally identified by the contents of the subject line. For example, the highlighted rule in the first image below identifies a bounced message as one which contains “Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender” in the subject line. As such, Subscriber will treat it as a bounce.

There are two types of bounces that are recognized by Subscriber:

• Hard Bounce type indicates that the non-delivery of the message is caused by a potentially permanent problem (for example email account / user no longer exists).
• Soft Bounce type indicates that there is a temporary problem delivering the email (for example Mailbox is Full).

To change an existing bounce rule, simply highlight the rule in the list, and choose Modify. Similarly, to remove a bounce rule simply highlight the rule and click Delete. You can also create any number of new rules as required to satisfy your particular configuration and strategy.

To configure how Bounces are handled, go to the Tools Menu, Manage Bounces.

Subscriber allows recipients to be deleted or excluded after a certain number (or threshold) of bounces occur. In the figure above, the recipient details will be deleted from all groups if either 1 hard bounce or 4 soft bounce occurs. You can change these values as you desire.  However, I always recommend to Customers to set the Hard Bounces to 1.

• Exclude Recipients: Check this option to add the bounced email address to the exclusion list.
• Remove Bounced Recipients from All Groups: Tick this option if you want recipient details to be deleted from all groups, when the bounce threshold is reached.
• Execute Stored Procedure: Check this option to specify a stored procedure to handle updating your database with bounce details when the threshold is reached.

You can also identify “Friendly” emails that you know are valid but which might have technical issues during sending so that those addresses won’t be affected by the rules you specify.

You can also configure GroupMail Subscriber Add-on to remove opt-out and unsubscribe email requests.

As always, if you have any questions or need some help along the way, don’t hesitate to contact our technical support team

Step 1).  Open the “Regional and Language Options” from the Windows Control Panel.  Click on the “Language” tab and tick both boxes for “Supplemental language support” if not already ticked, like in the screen shot below:

Step 2).  Click on the “Advanced” tab and select Japanese as the “Language for non-Unicode programs” using the drop down list and check that the Japanese language is also checked in the “Code page conversion tables” below that.  You will need to restart your PC after making those changes.  See the screen shot below:

Step 3).  On the GroupMail side of things you just need to set Japanese as the character set and select a usable font.  To set this option, open GroupMail and click on “Tools” from the top menu and then “Message Related Options”.  In the General tab, from the “Character set” drop down list, choose “Japanese (JIS)“.   For the font, Microsoft recommend the use of “MS UI Gothic” as it provides support for the Japanese characters.  See the screen shot below:

Here we can now see some Japanese characters in the GroupMail Message Editor. (Please forgive me on the content as I just copied and pasted some text from a Japanese website).

This is how the content looks when viewing the HTML source of your message from the GroupMail Message Editor.

This is how the message looks when read in Microsoft Outlook 2010.

That’s all there is to it!

Interested? Send your Japanese fans and customers email with our award-winning GroupMail email newsletter software.

“…How can I restore a GroupMail backup?..”

In a different article, we explain how to backup contacts in GroupMail.

To restore a GroupMail backup, the first thing you want to do is to close GroupMail (you can’t restore a backup if GroupMail is open.)

Then, in Windows, go to the Start, All Programs, GroupMail 5, Add-Ons and choose Backup & Restore.

When the GroupMail Backup & Restore screen appears, select the Restore option and press Next.

Then, press the Select button to browse to the location of the Backup file.  If you have a number backups listed, select the backup that you want to restore and press Next.

Each backup will list the date and time that backup was created.

Finally, select the Items that you want to restore. In the example below, we  selected to restore :

– Local Groups & Exclusion List
– Message Drafts & Templates
– Sent & Scheduled Items

Please note that if any fields on this screen are greyed out, this indicates that these options were not included in the original backup [i.e. the User did not choose to backup these items].

To proceed with the Restore simply click on the Restore Button.

Press Yes to confirm you wish to restore the backup.  Once you do this, all existing data in GroupMail will be replaced with the data from the backup file.

When the backup is successfully restored, the progress screen will show Restore Successful. You can then start GroupMail from that final screen or close the Backup & Restore Add-on.

Congratulations!

You have now successfully restored your GroupMail backup and ready to pick up where you left off.

If you have any questions or need some help along the way, do not hesitate to email our technical support team

Interested? Download GroupMail email newsletter software today.

Step 1

Open the Region and Language option from the Windows 7 Control Panel.  Click on the Keyboards and Languages tab and click the button for Install/uninstall languages, like in the screen shot below:

Choose to Install a Display Language and from the Windows update option, install the Japanese Language pack if not already installed.

Step 2

Click on the Administrative tab and then click the Change system locale button.

Select Japanese as the Language for non-Unicode programs from the drop down list.  You will need to restart your PC after making those changes.

See the screen shot below:

Step 3

In GroupMail, you just need to set Japanese as the character set and select a usable font.

To set this option, open GroupMail and click on Tools from the top menu and then Message Related Options.  In the General tab, choose Japanese (JIS) from the Character set drop down list.  For the font, Microsoft recommends the use of “MS UI Gothic” as it provides support for the Japanese characters.

See the screen shot below:

Below, we can see some Japanese characters in the GroupMail Message Editor that I entered after selecting the above settings. (Please forgive me, if I just said something offensive, as I just copied and pasted some text from a Japanese website).

This is how the content looks when viewing the HTML source of your message from the GroupMail Message Editor.

This is how the message looks when read in Microsoft Outlook 2010.

That’s all there is to it!

Interested? Send your Japanese fans and customers email with our award-winning GroupMail email newsletter software.

Step 1. Create your website/blog Opt-in form

Log-in to your GroupMail customer account online and click on the Additional Downloads link under your license details as shown below.

Click on the “Opt-In Manager” option from the menu on the right.

This will open the area to manage your opt-in forms.
(You can create numerous opt-in forms from this page)

To create your first opt-in form, click on the Create New Form button as shown below.

You can now fill in your opt-in form details, i.e. the title of your form, the email address you want your subscribers details sent to etc.

Note, on this form you can edit the CSS to match the style of your website or blog. You can also change the text that appears on your form, the finish message and the email that is sent to your subscribers to confirm their subscription.

Email Format: If you check the email format option, it will ask your subscribers to choose html or text emails when signing up to your newsletter. (This should only be used if you plan to send text and html emails)

Surname Field: If you choose this option, you can decide to ask for the Firstname & Surname from each subscriber. This will allow you to personalize your newsletter to Firstname or Surname.

In this case, I have included the LastName field and left the rest as default settings. I have also added my opt-in form name and the email address I want my subscriber details sent to.

Once complete, click on the Save Button to continue.

Now you have created your Opt-in form. Here, you can edit, preview and delete your opt-in form.

Any changes you make to the form in future, click Save and the changes will automatically appear on your website/blog.

Next you want to preview how your opt-in form looks, click on Preview.

This shows you how the Opt-in form will look on your website

As you can see in this example, the opt-in form will include the Name, LastName and Email address of your subscriber.

Once you are happy with the opt-in form you can now copy the html code (beneath) to your website html and the opt-in form will then appear on your website.

(You may need to ask your website designer or IT person to help you with this).

Once the form is on your site, you are now ready to collect your subscriptions in GroupMail. Once your visitor signs-up for your newsletter they are sent a confirmation email to confirm their subscription. They then need to click a link to confirm they have signed up to your newsletter. (Double opt-in)

Once they confirm, you are then sent an email with your subscriber details. Example below: