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The latest release information about the E-mail Campaign Manager module.

1.  Release History

July 19, 2011

The E-mail Campaign Manager module v1.0.0 rev.110714 is released.

Tested with Sitecore CMS 6.2.0 rev.101105 (Update-5).

New Features
Email Delivery

• Improved integration with the Sitecore App Center Email Delivery Service, which can be used to send large numbers of email messages reliably.
• A built-in facility allowing users to test the connection to the configured e-mail server has been introduced. This replaces the Email Server Verification Testing tool.

Performance and Optimization

• Significant improvements have been made to the performance of the e-mail dispatch process, ensuring a significant number of e-mails can be sent in a short time as part of an email campaign.
• An ECM performance tuning guide has been created, to help developers and administrators optimized e-mail dispatch performance.
• An emulation mode has been introduced, which provides a means of testing campaign throughput by emulating an MTA. MTA emulation allows you to mimic the round trip time required to send an email from the ECM to an MTA.

Important changes

• The following settings have been added to the ECM configuration file, as part of new features:
  • MaxConnectionUnavailable - the period of time the module tries to restore an MTA connection before a dispatch is paused.
  • MaxSendingAttempts - the number of attempts to send a message.
  • CheckReceiverRights - specifies whether to check the Read right of a recipient for a target item during message generation.
  • MtaEmulation.Active - specifies whether the message sending process is emulated without actual message transmission via MTA.
  • MtaEmulation.MinSendTime - the minimum amount of time to emulate a single dispatch.
  • MtaEmulation.MaxSendTime  - the maximum amount of time to emulate a single dispatch.
  • MtaEmulation.FailProbability - the probability of a connection fail that should be used for the emulation.
  • SMTP.MaxConnections - the maximum number of concurrent open SMTP connections allowed.
  • SMTP.ConnectionExpiration - the period of time the module keeps an SMTP connection open.
• The following settings have new default values:
  • MaxGenerationThreads (new default value: Environment.ProcessorCount * 2)
• The Renderer URL setting used to configure dedicated servers in multisite environments was removed from the ECM configuration item as this is now set automatically.
• The module now uses the new Sitecore App Center 2.0 API. This has added functionality to interact with MTA email delivery servers, including richer and more accurate Delivery Status Notification statistics.

Issues fixed
Performance and Dispatch issues

• An issue which caused performance issues when dispatching multiple email campaigns has been fixed. (340215)
• An issue which caused message dispatching to pause for a period of time if all configured dispatch threads were not in use has been fixed. (341413)
• An issue which caused messages to fail to be sent if a subscriber has comma in the username has been fixed. Additional special characters in the usernames have also been allowed. (347193)
• The module now attempts to resend any failed messages when a dispatch is resumed after having been paused. (344413)
• The email sent to administrators when a dispatch has been aborted has an incorrect subject – it says “Dispatch process is complete”.

Reporting & logging issues

• An issue causing the number of delivered messages in a subject test to be reported incorrectly has been fixed. (344923)
• An issue causing the dispatch of a message to be aborted if a subscriber has been disabled has been fixed. (343322)
• Additional logging information has been included when users are skipped during the queuing phase of the dispatch process. Log information is added when users are not found, disabled, reach a maximum number of failed deliveries, or have invalid email addresses. (344185)
• Additional logging information during the dispatch process has been added. Log information is now added which indicate the number of queued recipients and the dispatch duration. (344205)

Other issues

• An issue which causes sending failures for messages in a Target Audience which has been serialized and moved to another solution and then deserialized. (343973)

April 05, 2011

The E-mail Campaign Manager module v1.0.0 rev.110329 is released.

Tested with Sitecore CMS 6.2.0 rev.101105 (Update-5).

New Features

1. The online version of the Newsletter Message is now personalized. (337001)
2. The Manager Root and Target Audience items now include a Return Address field.  DSN messages are returned to the given address. (335996)
3. Improved performance of message generating/sending. (340325)
4. If the connection with the SMTP server fails, Sitecore automatically attempts to re-connect to the server. Sleep time between attempts and number of attempts are configurable. (339917)
5. Added "CheckReceiverRights" setting, which indicates whether to check the Read right of a recipient for a target item of a message during message generation. The default value is "false".  To change it, add this setting to Email Campaign configuration file and set the value to “true”. (340026)
6. Usernames of recipients that failed to receive the message are now written to log. (341408)
7. Caching of renderings used in messages is now supported. (340403)

Issues Resolved

1. SQL deadlocks warnings were sometimes written to log when dispatching in multithread mode. (338122)
2. Static images were included in emails with an incorrect Content-Type setting. (337491)
3. “Mailto” links in emails were displayed incorrectly in the client. (337232)
4. Embedded images in attachments were shown incorrectly in some browser-based email clients like Yahoo. (337233)
5. In some cases when 2 messages were dispatched at the same time, one of them could be paused. (336673)
6. The Open Email goal was not registered. (334401)
7. Subscription failed if Require Authentication option on Subscription form was selected. (332054)
8. The Base URL value was not inserted into <img/> tags when the Embed Images option was unchecked. (332814)
9. An exception was thrown during subscription if the RequiresUniqueEmail setting was set. (332078, 338943, 338943)
10. Test sending didn’t work properly if there were no subscribers. (330353)
11. When the Undelivered Max setting was set to 0, sending could fail and an exception would be written into the log. (329730)
12. If SMTP was turned off during message sending, Sitecore moved the message to the Sent folder and set the state to Aborted. (328947)
13. When leveraging dedicated servers: messages could sometimes be sent on the wrong language. (329782)
14. When using multiple threads and SMTP was turned off, the dispatch of messages could fail. (338945)
15. The "Returning vs. New Visitors" report could give incorrect statistics. (339534, 340257)
16. Dispatch was aborted if the user name of a subscribed user contained a comma or quotation mark (‘). (339227, 341411)
17. The Email Campaign related script was run for every Rich Text field in non-ECM items. (337393)
18. The Email Campaign Manager did not handle SQL timeout exceptions in all cases. (340555)
19. Email Campaign personalization didn’t work for some CRM fields. (341545)
20. The presentation of a message could fail if invalid tokens were placed in subject. (342519)
21. Unsubscribing could fail if the “Target Audience member” role was assigned to user through Roles In Roles. (342527)
22. The “Message Subject Test” report could show incorrect subjects. (341705)
23. If a user was disabled, he was shown in the report as “Send Failed” instead of being skipped. (342491)
24. Some statistics could be incorrectly in the “Visit Analysis” report. (337820)

June 15, 2010

The E-mail Campaign Manager module v1.0.0 rev.100608 is released.

Tested with Sitecore CMS 6.2.0 rev.100507.

Compatibility
This version of the module only runs on Sitecore 6.2.

2.  Known issues

The following known issues have been found with the ECM 1.0

• Message subject testing cannot be performed on the “HTML” and “Plain Text” email campaign message types.
   
• Subscription confirmation/notification messages are not sent in Live mode (358144)
   
  Workaround:
  Download the file with the updated pages.
  1. Replace the /sitecore/ConfirmSubscription.html and /sitecore/Unsubscribe.html files with the files that you download (item filtering is disabled for ClientApi calls).
  2. Modify and build the Subscription Form code file (see an example in the Subscription Form.ascx.cs file that you download):
     a. Add the UpdateSubscriptions() method (see its implementation in the Subscription Form.ascx.cs file that you download).
     b. Replace the following line:
     string itemIDToRedirect = ClientApi.UpdateSubscriptions(ContextContact.Name, infoArray, confirmSubscription);
     with the line
     string itemIDToRedirect = this.UpdateSubscriptions(infoArray);