Maxprog @ Blogger

As you probably know I am in charge of answering support requests here at Maxprog. As a result, MaxBulk Mailer users asked me about e-mail delivery issues quite often, especially problems related to spam filtering software flagging and blocking their legitimate messages. This is called 'false positives'. This particular issue is quite frustrating because most of the time you have no idea where the problem comes from. In other words, you have no clue about what is happening and even what to do to fix it. It is even more frustrating for me when people think maxprog bulk mailer software is the culprit. There is no relation actually, MaxBulk Mailer is an e-mail client like any other. So, how do I Avoid My Emails being Marked as Spam? In this post, I will try to gather all my knowledge about how to prevent running into this kind of problem. Let's see the typical story: Writing and sending a message You composed your newsletter, as usual, you selected your subscriber list and t...

MaxBulk Mailer already allows you to unsubscribe people from a list but what happens if some recipients are subscribed to more than one list and they explicitly asked not to receive anything else from you, in other words, how to unsubscribe emails in bulk? Well, you have the choice between processing each list separately and unsubscribe the recipient from each of them or use the MaxBulk Mailer Global Blacklist feature. In fact, the Global Blacklist prevents you from sending messages to given addresses whichever the list you have selected. In other words, you just need to add the address once to the blacklist to get it automatically blocked everywhere else! Furthermore, you can even block a whole domain or a name independently from its domain! As unsubscribed addresses, blacklisted recipients are automatically discarded by MaxBulk Mailer when sending messages. Blacklisting an email address is very simple. Let's see... How to unsubscribe emails in bulk, blacklisting Al Capone Se...

You probably found out that since MaxBulk Mailer 8.7, the 'Preview' panel no longer displays pictures referenced by addresses starting with 'http://' like before. You may wonder why MaxBulk Mailer now only supports 'https://' links? Apple Security requirements It turns out that Apple announced a new security requirement for iOS and OS X apps: App Transport Security . From Apple’s docs : Starting in iOS 9.0 and OS X v10.11, a new security feature called App Transport Security (ATS) is available to apps and is enabled by default. It improves the privacy and data integrity of connections between an app and web services by enforcing additional security requirements for HTTP-based networking requests. Specifically, with ATS enabled, HTTP connections must use HTTPS (RFC 2818). Attempts to connect using insecure HTTP fail. Furthermore, HTTPS requests must use best practices for secure communications. MaxBulk Mailer now only supports https links Starting wi...

All Maxprog 's products include a 'hidden' menu with some interesting tools you may need at some time. That menu is inside the 'About' window, you know, the 'About MaxBulk Mailer ...', 'About iCash ...' and so on. On the top right you will see a menu button with a cog icon. That is it! What do you get there? Well, it actually depends on whether your application copy has been registered or not. If you haven't registered the application yet you will be able to 'Purchase', 'Register', have a look at the 'License Agreement' or even 'Restore Factory Settings'. Now, if you did purchase and you already registered the application you will be able to 'Get Info', 'Copy the activation code' and 'Unregister'. In addition if your Update Plan has expired you will see a 'Update Plan ? Renew...' menu. Most of the menus are quite self explanatory. You can purchase a license, register it and check the...

As you probably know I am in charge of answering support request here at Maxprog. Quite often I am being asked about email delivery issues, specially problems regarding apparently legitimate messages being flagged and blocked by spam filtering software. This particular issue is quite frustrating because most of the time you have no idea where the problem come from. It is even more frustrating for me when people think the culprit is MaxBulk Mailer , maxprog bulk mailer software. There is no relation actually, MaxBulk Mailer is an email client like any other. In this post I will try to gather all my knowledge about how to prevent running into this kind of problem. Let's see the typical story: You composed your newsletter as usual, you selected your subscriber list and then sent the message with a copy to yourself. You later found out that your copy never arrived and then, asking to a few subscribers it turns out some of them did not receive anything either. Does this story looks fa...

With MaxBulk Mailer 8.6.7 we added support for DKIM. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is a method for validating the authenticity of email messages. When an email is sent with DKIM activated, it is signed using a private key and then validated on the receiving mail server (or ISP) using a public key on your domain DNS record. Using DKIM is opcional but quite recommended since having emails that are signed with DKIM appear more legitimate to your recipients and are less likely to go to Junk or Spam folders. In addition to verifying the authenticity of an email message, DKIM also provides a way for ISPs to track and build a reputation on your domain's sending history. So, in order to use DKIM first you need a domain and you have to use an email address from that domain as the sender of your emails. For example our domain is 'maxprog.com' and our address 'support' belongs to that domain. If you don't have a domain and/or use a gmail/hotmail/yahoo address for examp...

I already posted about this topic a month ago, this is just a reminder with some updated info. As you very likely know, 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 10 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. Each time I go for holidays I have to prepare everything months in advance, usually optimizing things, publishing tutorials and releasing very stable versions of all the software. The idea is to reduce support as much as possible because it may take some time for the customers to get a response. This year is not an exception, Maxprog has released 64...

The European Union (EU) introduced a landmark regulation called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR in short) on the 25th of May. The goal of GDPR is to give EU residents drastic improvements to their privacy rights and control over their personal data, and to protect them from privacy breaches and leaks. Every organisation that handles, markets or tracks the personal data of EU residents is concerned, even if they are not based in Europe. In the case of software companies which typically sell their products globally, this means that this new regulation will apply to everyone, no matter where they are based. There are strong penalties in place for non-compliance: up to €20m or 4% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher. Making sure we were compliant, and that the personal data of the customers buying our products was treated correctly, whilst continuing to provide a great customer experience has been an important focus for us over the past few months. Here are the ...

This week we have finished porting all our products to 64-bits. We also updated the App Store versions accordingly following Apple new requirements regarding Entitlements and SandBoxing. But do you actually know what Entitlements and SandBoxing are? Even if you are not a programmer it is always interesting to have a small idea about security concepts since we are talking about security. macOS has supported Sandboxing since OS X Lion, which was released in 2011. The Mac App Store has required apps to be sandboxed since March 2012. Windows does not natively provide app sandboxing, but some apps (such as Microsoft Office programs) can be run in a sandboxed mode. Additionally, several Windows utilities allow you to run apps in a sandbox, preventing them from affecting the system or other applications. Sandboxing restricts an application’s access to only system resources, including the file system, for which it’s explicitly given access. A sandboxed application is given a code si...

iCash is a personal finance software intended to keep track of your incomes, expenses, credits, debts and Banks transactions for you. But what does 'Personal finance' actually mean? Personal finance is the application of the principles of financial economics to an individual's (or a family's) financial decisions. It asks, "How much money will you need at various points in the future?" and "How do you go about getting that money?". It deals with questions like: • What is my annual income? • How can I increase my income? • What are my annual expenses? • How can I reduce my expenses? • How do I best budget my available income each year? • How much money can I save each year? • How much will I accumulate over my working lifetime? • Will this be enough to support me after I retire? • How much will it cost each year after I retire? • How many years will I be retired? • How do I pay for large expenses (like children's educatio...

A program that doesn't start, crashes often or is not performing as expected even in term of speed may be a sign of a system issue, either Hardware or Software. Before spending time looking for the source of the problem and if your computer has not been rebooted recently, make sure to reboot it before following. You will very likelly save time since a simple reboot use to fix most problems. If it is not the case, continue reading, below are steps for macOS and MS Windows users that can help fix problems and speed up the software or even the whole System. • Background programs: One of the most common reasons for a slow computer are programs running in the background. Remove or disable any useless background applications and startup programs that automatically start each time the computer boots. To see what programs are running in the background and how much memory and CPU they are using, open Activity Monitor on macOS or Task Manager on Windows (note that if you are running Window...

Most modern operating systems like Apple macOS, Microsoft Windows and Linux are all 64-bits operating systems. For that reason we have been working on 64-bit versions of all our products for months. At WWDC 2017, Apple announced new apps submitted to the Mac App Store must support 64-bit starting January 2018, and Mac app updates and existing apps must support 64-bit starting June 2018. macOS High Sierra will be the last macOS release to support 32-bit apps without compromise. The next release of macOS after High Sierra will begin to restrict 32-bit apps and will feature "aggressive" warnings about the coming change. Apple has not said at exactly which point support will be phased out completely. For Windows, Microsoft still ships both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. So we’ll have to also have both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of our apps available. Customers that are running a 64-bit version of Windows can run either the 32-bit or 64-bit versions of our apps. But customers on a 32...

I wrote eMail Verifier and I have been using and developing the tool for years. As a developer and also a user I was very worried about deleting valid emails. So I created a system that only flags bad emails, I mean, when there is absolutely no doubts. If eMail Verifier is not 100% sure then the address is mark as 'Looks Good' or 'Looks Bad' and the user decides what to do. The software tries to clean the list its best but without taking any risk of deleting valid emails. Yesterday, steveb-ci, an eMail Verifier customer posts a very interesting comment in our forum about eMail Verifier compared to online solutions. This is what its says: I've been on a big test recently, comparing how well the various email cleaning services compare to each other. I started with a list of 1500 emails that hadn't been used in several years. Email verifier reduced the list to 1275 addresses marked as OK, or looks OK. I then ran the list of 1500 through some of the most popular ...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

Maxprog just turned 16 years old last monday. Believe me or not, it has been a quite pleasant journey. That's very likely because I do what I always wanted. I am a self-taught vocational software developer, I started programming when I was around twelve. In my place computers were like UFOs so no one could help you or even understand you. I have always been fascinated by algoritms (and spinning things), I started very early and never stopped however, being fascinated by something and creating a company are two different things that require very different skill sets. Indeed, in order to be successful creating a company you have to learn about business, you have to create real products, market them, handle payments and after-sales support. Later you may need to hire people, outsource stuff, learn basic accounting etc. Finally you have to fight against your competitors, maintain a good visibility on the internet and take the right decisions in order to continue in business. Most peopl...