Maxprog @ Blogger

Email server blocking is an unexpected stressful situation you will soon or later go thru. In this article, I will try to explain how to fix this annoying problem. Email server blocking causes and solutions There are times your email service just blocks you when using MaxBulk Mailer (or any other bulk email software), even though you are not sending spam but a legitimate message to an opt-in email list. They say they don't allow bulk mail, only through their own proprietary service. Let me share some valuable information with you about my very last experience with MaxBulk Mailer. I just finished sending a message to a 52k list successfully! Our last MaxBulk Mailer campaign I programmed MaxBulk Mailer to deliver to 5 recipients every 3 minutes. The overall delivery rate has been 100 deliveries per hour. That is only 2'400 deliveries every 24 hours. It took 22 days to finish! MaxBulk Mailer has been running and sending to my list during all that time, day and night, unattended a...

Using free HTML email templates with MaxBulk Mailer is an excelent way of catching your customer attention. Indeed, MaxBulk Mailer supports the HTML format. Let's see how we can use HTML email templates with MaxBulk Mailer. The HTML language HTML is a very simple programming language that was originally created to allow anyone to design web pages. A web page is usually rendered by a web browser. The web browser reads the page, interprets its contents and shows you the result. A web page is a plain text file that contains HTML code. The HTML code is made of two parts, the header, and the body. You insert contents by writing text into the body part. The header part contains the page settings. The web browser uses that information to render the page. You use tags to set the text format, to insert pictures, videos, and links. Tags are text enclosed into brackets that tell the web browser what to show and how. All the HTML tags have a specific format and a set of parameters. You always...

eMail Verifier , as its name indicates, is a tool for checking single e-mail addresses or lists of e-mail addresses. E-mail validation speed with eMail Verifier may vary. Let's see how we can go faster. The software performs a series of checks to validate every e-mail address including, a syntax check, an e-mail address domain check and finally an e-mail address validity check with the server. All those checks take time to perform and sometimes a user may wonder how much time he will have to spend on this, especially when testing big lists. They can dramatically affect the overall validation speed when verifying a list of e-mail addresses depending on its size. Let's imagine you have a list of e-mail addresses containing 72'000 entries and you need to test every single address with eMail Verifier. So, you load the list and click on the 'Verify' button... E-mail validation speed with eMail Verifier 10 minutes, one hour, a day? Well, there is no way to get an exact ...

As you may know MaxBulk Mailer is one of the products we develop and market. It is a Bulk Email Software (and email merge tool) for both macOS and Microsoft Windows that allows anyone to send out customized offers, press releases, price lists or any text or HTML message to a list of subscribers, friends or customers. Basically you can create, manage and send your own powerful, personalized marketing message to small to medium lists. The good thing is that MaxBulk Mailer is a software tool that you purchase once, no need to pay on a per-email basis to submission services. You know that Email Marketing is spreading around the whole world because of its high effectiveness, speed and low cost. If you want to introduce and sell your product or service, the best way is to use e-mail to contact your targeted customer. We created MaxBulk Mailer with that in mind. Email Marketing Email marketing is indeed one of the best marketing technique mostly because it is the cheapest form of advertisin...

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...