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Showing posts from February, 2018

Maxprog will be closed from June 6 to July 9, really?

Every year the Maxprog company closes its doors for a month or so. It is the time for enjoying life a bit, far from the internet and all the technologies alike. Last year we were closed almost during all March. This year it will be from June 6 to July 9 both inclusive, please take note! During that time I will do support as usual BUT I will connect to the internet from time to time, maybe twice a week. You can't really enjoy holidays if you are working as the rest of the year. The ideal would be not connecting at all. Actually in the last 16 years I have never been able to get really disconnected more than 2 or 3 days, I envy the people that can do that, really, you know, on the beach, reading a book, spending all the time with your family. Well that's not really my case since half of my brain always remain in Maxprog. I am sure you understand what I am talking about. I am in charge of a department, it is my duty and I can't really stop thinking about it. Each time I go for...

Why you should avoid sending attachments

MaxBulk Mailer fully supports attachments but except in very particular cases I would recommend not to send attachments as part of a bulk email campaign. I mean all of them, whatever they are, PDFs, Word files, Excel files and even pictures. There are several reasons for that but I will talk about the most important ones (in my opinion) for you and your recipients: - Message size and delivery speed: If you add attachments to your message you have to be very careful about the total size of the files, especially when sending individual messages (default) because you will send as many times that size during the delivery. That means sending a 250 KB attachment to 1,000 recipients will generate 250 MB traffic! As SMTP servers use to give around 2KB/s bandwidth per client, your delivery will take up to 35 hours to complete! - Security: If you are like me, you are getting more and more spam with attachments. There is a real proliferation of such messages. If you don't know the person sen...

Why eMail Verifier loves port 25 so much

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eMail Verifier really requires full access to port 25 in order to work, don't waste your time trying with other "alternative" ports, that doesn't work. eMail Verifier is not an email client, it doesn't connect to your SMTP server. eMail Verifier actually connects to other's mail servers and this type of connection is done exclusively thru the port 25. Why this? Well, "Port 25" is just a network connection channel. Some Internet Service Providers (ISP) intercept port 25 so it is not possible to use eMail Verifier nor any software using port 25. Some independent SMTP servers support an additional port other than 25 (26, 587, 2525...) to allow users with authenticated access to connect to them even if port 25 is blocked. Unfortunately eMail Verifier can't use such alternative port as it needs to connect to each address SMTP relay server, not only your server. Relay servers (MTA) only work on port 25. In fact, all e-mail sent via the Internet is ro...

Ugly emails with MaxBulk Mailer? Not MaxBulk Mailer fault.

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Believe it or not I have heard people complaining about the ugliness of there messages sent with MaxBulk Mailer as if it were the software fault. MaxBulk Mailer is only a software to send messages, it sends what you write in the message field just as is. Of course, if you send ugly stuff it will be ugly for your receivers as well but if you send complex messages they may conflict with the recipient software especially webmail systems and your receiver may not receive exactly the same as what you sent. MaxBulk Mailer supports several formats, Plain Text, Styled Text and HTML. Plain Text format will never produce unexpected results since it is a format that doesn't use any kind of formatting, it is just text. The Styled Text format lets you apply styles to your text like bold, italic and underline, change the text color, insert pictures etc. It even lets you insert HTML code directly so you can add a table for example. The Styled Text format very rarely produces unexpected results,...