Some customers of of the drip marketing suite Arigato PRO can’t run cron jobs on their servers for one or another reason. But this is not reason to worry:

Arigato Pro does not require cron jobs to send scheduled emails. We just recommend setting up cron jobs because this method is more reliable and less resource intensive. If for some reason you can’t set up cron jobs, there are alternatives:

a) Use the option “I will rely on my blog visitors to initiate the email sending”. You’ll find it on the Arigato Pro Settings page:

b) Use some of the many web based cron job services. For example this one is free, and there are many more free or very reasonably priced ones. Do a search for “web cron jobs” and choose a service you like.

Saying all this, please have in mind that cron jobs are not some kind of luxury or high-tech service. They are provided even by the cheapest web hosts. If your hosting service cannot provide such basic feature you should probably consider changing it.

Version 2.7 of the WordPress drip marketing suite Arigato PRO has been released. Highlights between versions 2.6 and 2.7:

• Added report by email domain for newsletter and autoresponder message reports.
• Added option to manually move subscribers from one mailing list to another.
• Added server-side email validation for cases when the JS validation is skipped.
• Added filter by signup date on the Manage Subscribers page.
• Now you can pause autoresponder messages. Pausing is like deleting them: they will not be sent accordingly to the schedule. But instead of deleting you just pause and can re-activate them at any time.
• Blacklist management is available: you can specify email addresses and IP addresses that will not be allowed to sign up for the mailing lists. You can also use wildcards to mark one or more characters.
• You can now configure the content of the new member signup notification email sent to admin.
• Implemented version 2 of Google’s reCaptcha (“No captcha reCaptcha”). You can use either version but we strongly recommend version 2.
• Added variable {{list-name}} for newsletters and autoresponder messages. Will be replaced with the name of the user’s mailing list.
• The “placeholder” attribute can be added to shortcodes of text fields and simple textareas to generate a HTML placeholder. Example: [bftpro-field-static name placeholder=”Your name”].
• You can now specify different email address to receive your test messages (in “Send test” feature for newsletters and autoresponder emails).
• Further improvements done to prevent sending duplicate emails (such issue has happened to a small number of users).
• Fixed bugs with presets and sending test emails with them.
• Fixed bugs with custom fields (checkboxes) when used in Filter / search subscribers.

As usual, the latest version is sent by newsletter to eligible subscribers. If you have not received it, feel free to send us email. If your free upgrades subscription has expired, you can renew with 60% discount.