Monthly Archives: December 2016

Some Basics of Successful Email Delivery

While this post is mostly pointed to customers of Arigato PRO, it can be used as guide for everyone who has problems with delivery rates of their outgoing newsletters and auto-responder emails.

Here are two very important steps to take that will greatly improve the delivery of your emails:

Use SMTP. PHP mail works… sometimes. It sends emails but doesn’t construct the envelope too well and generally isn’t too reliable. Setting up SMTP is really easy and takes few minutes. Every paid hosting service provides email accounts with SMTP access. Ask your provider if you are not sure about this. If you are not happy with their quality and delivery rates you can use affordable services like Amazon SES, smtp.com, SendGrid etc. Heck, you can even use Gmail as free SMTP service.

Here’s a great guide on setting up Amazon SES. You may skip the VPS part because you likely already have a hosting. We can also provide paid help if required.

Here is how to find SMTP details in Cpanel which is the most popular hosting control panel:

Arigato customers and everyone who sends from WordPress can install some of the free plugins like Post SMTP, WP Mail SMTP, Easy WP SMTP. etc. Arigato will automatically send emails through them.

Please do use SMTP, it greatly improves delivery.

Use a sender address from your domain name. For example if I send you newsletter from this site, it will be sent from someone@calendarscripts.info. If I use domain name different than calendarscripts.info this will reduce my success a lot. Many email servers will block the incoming email due to domain mismatch. In many other cases the email will end up in the spam box.

If you are using SMTP account from other domain (like Amazon SES, or Gmail) your sender’s address must be the same as the SMTP account. So if you are sending from SMTP someone@gmail.com, use the same as sender address.

Don’t look like a spammer. This is subjective but nowadays spam filters are rather intelligent. An email full of typos or grammatical errors will quickly be labeled as a spam. Same goes about and email message containing too much exclamation signs, SCREAMING, and so on. How much is too much? You never know for sure so bend on the safer side and tone down your messages.

Too many links inside the message will also mark it as spam.

Here is a good place to check the spam score of your emails.

Send a responsive email

If you are just using a regular WP editor to create your email contents, it will most likely be responsive. If you are using more advanced design you must make sure your emails are responsive (Note that all email presents provided by Arigato PRO and the Gozaimasu module are fully responsive by default and you don’t need to do anything about that)

Regarding Arigato PRO

Have in mind that Arigato PRO is an email marketing software, not an email sender software. It handles the logic of sending the desired emails at the desired time, managing mailing lists, etc. The technical sending of emails is handled in this order:

  • Arigato sends the email to your WordPress installation by calling the wp_mail command. This is the last time we have control over the emails.
  • Your WordPress installation instructs your mailing server to send the email. This process may be affected by SMTP plugin if you have installed such (recommended).
  • Your mailing server handles the actual sending of the email. If the email is not sent, this is the place where the problem occurs.

So if emails are not sent and Arigato says they are sent, this means you should contact your hosting support or your SMTP provider (when you use external SMTP).

Namaste! PRO v. 1.3

We have just released version 1.3 of the Pro addon to Namaste! LMS. Here are the new things since version 1.2:

  • Added leaderboard generator for leaderboards by points, grades, num. completed assignments, num. completed lessons, and num. completed courses.
  • Added new criteria for the leaderboards: limit to users who belong to a selected group / class.
  • Added option to automatically replace your theme default next / previous links on lesson pages (thus no need to use the next / prev shortcodes).
  • Enabled simple shopping cart for buying access to premium courses and classes .
  • Implemented the Paypal PDT option for paid class signups.
  • Coupon codes can now be restricted to specific class or course.
  • When a course is added in a class / group even teachers will be restricted from viewing its lessons unless the course belongs to their classes.
  • Added class filter on the gradebook so when non-administrator is assigned a class manager role they’ll see only students in their class.
  • The views / templates can be customized the same way as in the free Namaste! LMS plugin.
  • Built-in integration with WP Simple Paypal Shopping Cart. You can  get shortcodes for all your courses and classes from the internal Help page.
  • Fixed bug: class permissions of teachers were not applied to Protected files.
  • Fixed bug: when there were multiple class sign-up buttons on the page it was enough to click one of them to sign up for all classes.

The upgrade will be sent to eligible customers. If your free upgrades subscription has expired, you will be sent 60% discount code for optional renewal.

WatuPRO 5.3

WatuPRO version 5.3 is out with a new set of improvements and bug fixes:

  • A new page will give you the submissions on all quizzes in chronological order.
  • A new field for internal comments to the quiz is added, so admin / staff can add notes to each quiz. The notes will then be shown on the admin Quizzes page under the title.
  • You can now specify spacing between questions and between question and its answers from the WatuPRO Settings page, without writing any CSS. More design configurations like this are coming soon.
  • A new “completion criteria” feature on the Advanced Settings tab of the Edit Quiz page lets you define which grades will mark the quiz as “completed” on the user’s dashboard.
  • The shortcode [watupro-result] now can print the whole “final screen” from given quiz taking by passing “details” to the “what” parameter (see the internal WatuPRO Help page for more details).
  • Added variable %%POINTS-ROUNDED%% to show the points collected on a quiz rounded without decimals.
  • Added variables %%START-TIME%% and %%END-TIME%% to be used for the time when quiz was started and completed.
  • You can optionally collect the source URL where the quiz is taken and filter by this data in the “View results” page. This could be useful if you are publishing the same quiz on multiple pages on your site.
  • Implemented reCaptcha v 2 (“No Captcha reCaptcha”).
  • Added option to select what number of quizzes and questions to manage per page.
  • Added 3 new color schemes for quiz designs.
  • [Intelligence module] In case of a tie on the top personality types, the personality quizzes will now display all matching ones.
  • [Intelligence module] ”Treat this question” as a whole option added to multiple-choice questions.
  • [Intelligence module] Coupon codes can now be limited to a selected quiz and have an expiration date.
  • [Intelligence module] Coupon codes will now work for non logged in users too.
  • [Intelligence module] You can now set text to be displayed at the final screen in case of premature quiz ending (See Intelligence module settings tab in Edit Quiz page).
  • [Reporting module] Stats per question page & shortcode now support date interval filter.
  • Fixed bug in the questions import, WatuPRO advanced format (answers were not properly importing after adding two fields to the export file).
  • Fixed UI issues with the “See answer” buttons when “Answer to each question can be seen immediately” is selected.
  • Fixed bug: the “stats per category” in Reporting module did not work correctly when the quiz reused questions from several quizzes.
  • Fixed bug: when copying questions in existing quiz the question were not placed after the original questions of the quiz, but inserted between them.

As always, the updated version is sent out via newsletter to eligible customers. If you did not receive your newsletter, feel free to contact us.