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

Some of the issues described on this page contain internal reference numbers. You can use these reference numbers when communicating with Sitecore about a particular issue or feature.

1.  Release History

July 26, 2011

The E-mail Campaign Manager v1.1.0 rev.110725 is released.

Tested with Sitecore CMS 6.3.1 rev. 110112.

Compatibility
This version of the module only runs on Sitecore 6.3.

Change log.

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 Resolved

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)

December 14, 2010

The E-mail Campaign Manager v1.1.0 rev.101119 is released.

Tested with Sitecore CMS 6.3.0 rev.100716.

Compatibility
This version of the module only runs on Sitecore 6.3.

Change log.

New features:

• The Email Campaign Manager is now optimized for multiple content delivery servers, as supported in Sitecore CMS 6.3. (331071)
• Delivery Status Notification messages can now be sent to a dedicated address.  A “Return Address” field has been added to both the Manager Root and Target Audience items, and this is now used as the destination of Delivery Status notification messages  (335996)
• A Danish translation of the Email Campaign Manager is now available. (333229)

Important changes:

• A “Renderer Url” field was added to the settings item template. It is used to define which server generates a messages. “Base url” will still be used to add links and images to messages. (331071)
• Captcha functionality has been removed from the module. For complex subscription scenarios where Captcha is required the Web Forms for Marketers module should be used. (331331)
• The HandleCaptcha processor has been removed from the Sitecore.EmailCampaign.config file as it is obsolete (330656)
• The Stimulsoft software used to create the Email Campaign reports has been updated in CMS 6.3. The Email Campaign reports have been changed to support this updated. Reports from earlier versions of the Email Campaign Manager will not work in v 1.1.0 or later.  (331418)
• The ChilkatDotNet2.dll has been moved and been renamed from bin_x64\ChilkatDotNet2.dll to bin\ChilkatDotNet2.x64. (330629).

Issues resolved:

• When the value of Undelivered Max = 0 in the Delivery Status Notification section of the Email Campaign Manager root item, messages were not sent correctly, and  exceptions occured in the log file. (329730)
• An issue which resulted in messages being Aborted instead of paused if the SMTP functionality was unavailable during  message dispatch has been resolved by adding a method which verifies that SMTP is functioning during message dispatch (328947)
• An issue which resulted in test messages not being sent when the message had no subscribers has been fixed. (331204)
• An issue which cause subscriptions to existing newsletter to fail if the Required Authentication field was checked on Subscription form has been fixed. (332054)
• An issue which could cause a message to be paused if two messages were sent simultaneously has been fixed. (336673)
• An issue causing images not to be shown in test emails when the “Embed Images” field was unselected (set to false) in the Message Generation section of the message root item has been resolved. (332814)
• The default value of the “Check DSN Messages” task item which dispatches Delivery Status Notification messages has been changed from “several times per week” to “once per day” (336180)
• An issue causing exceptions when attempting to subscribe anonymous subscribers if the value of “requiresUniqueEmail” = 1 (true) in the web.config file has been resolved. (332078)
• In several methods the default media link prefix was hardcoded. It now retrieves the value of Media.MediaLinkPrefix  in the web.config file. (333852)
• An issue causing the “Open Email” goal in the Online Marketing Suite not to be registered when using versions of Sitecore CMS 6.2 rev 100507 or later has been resolved (334401)
• An issue causing the email subjects in the Message Subject Test report to be displayed in the wrong language has been resolved; messages fall back to the Sitecore context language if the content editor language can’t be used. If there are no subjects in the current Sitecore context languages, they are displayed in the first existing language.(334391)
• An issue which resulted in messages sometimes being sent in the wrong language when using dedicated servers has been resolved by adding a "DispatchMessage" method to the DedicatedDispatchService (329782)
• A number of minor issues with translations and localization have been fixed (336688, 336589, 329172, 334393, 334394, 329171, 331074, 334392, 334398) 

2.  Known issues

The list of known issues present in the latest version of the E-mail Campaign Manager module.

1. Message subject testing cannot be performed.
   Reference number: 347258.
   Message subject testing cannot be performed on the “HTML” and “Plain Text” email campaign message types.
   

2. The Dispatch status is not displayed correctly.
   Reference number: 349382.
   The Dispatch status is not displayed correctly in the info panel if the IIS is reset during a dispatch.
   

3. Email Campaign Manager upgrade deletes three files required by the Web Forms for Marketers module
   Reference number: 338003
   Upgrading process of the Email Campaign Manager module to the version 1.1.0 rev.101119 deletes the following files required by the Web Forms for Marketers module:
       bin\MSCaptcha.dll
       bin\Sitecore.Captcha.dll
       App_Config\Includes\Captcha.config
   Workaround:
   1. Go to Website_root\temp\ __UpgradeHistory\ Upgrade_E-mail Campaign Manager-1.1.0 rev. 101119_[iso date when the package  was installed]\deleted
   2. Copy the following files:
       bin\MSCaptcha.dll
       bin\Sitecore.Captcha.dll
       App_Config\Includes\Captcha.config
   3. Paste the files to the appropriate folders in Website_root.
   

4. Dispatching does not function if a Common Opt-Out role is not defined.
   Reference number: 334389.
   Dispatching does not function if a Common Opt-Out role is not defined for a Target Audience and the Roles in Roles field is selected (set to true) in the Global Setting section of the Email Campaign item. If the RolesinRoles setting is unselected or a Common Opt-Out role is defined, dispatching works with no issues. (334389)
   

5. A dedicated server is unable to send messages the first time it is called.
   Reference number: 334390.
   A dedicated server is unable to send messages the first time it is called. This is only occurs on the first request after starting a site in the IIS.
    

6. 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);