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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

February 19, 2013

The E-mail Campaign Manager 1.3.3 rev.130212 is released.

Tested with Sitecore CMS 6.6 Update-3.

Compatibility

This version of the module runs on Sitecore CMS 6.6 Update-2 and up to CMS 7.0 Update-2.

Change log

Issues resolved

Performance and Dispatch issues:

• A deadlock error appeared in logs while the module dispatched emails to a large number of recipients (381559).
• An SQL error appeared in logs during several simultaneously scheduled dispatches (381565).

Issues related to the database:

• Extra “Redirect Url” and “Not found” records appeared in the [Analytics].[Pages] table in the Analytics database (378790).
• StateName field is populated with the current name of the message’s state in the [Analytics].[ AutomationState] table. Wish issue has been resolved (381557).

Issue related to external links in messages:

• Recipients got the “Page not found” error and an error in logs after clicking on an external link from the sent messages in case IIS was restarted (377454).

October 25, 2012

The E-mail Campaign Manager 1.3.3 rev.121017 is released.

Tested with Sitecore CMS 6.5 Update-6.

Compatibility

This version of the module runs on Sitecore CMS 6.5 Update-6, CMS 6.6 Update-2 and up to CMS 7.0 Update-2.

Change log

New Features

• The purpose of this release is to increase the performance and scalability of the Email Campaign Manager, and fine-tune the interactions with Sitecore Analytics, particularly in environments with multiple dedicated email servers.
• In particular the performance of the tracking of Opened E-mails and Link Clicks (for both internal and external links) has been significantly improved

Important Changes

• As from this release the URLs in the emails will use Redirect URL page with new parameter names to avoid any pipeline activations (370952, 362595, 369554, 370423, 371183, 361512).
• As of this release the URLs in the email will look like the following:
  Internal/External URLs:
  http://<your site>/sitecore/RedirectUrlPage.html?ec_url=<coded link>&ec_camp=<campaign ID>&ec_as=<automation state ID>
  As opposed to the earlier versions of ECM:
  Internal URL:
  http://<your site>/pageitem.html?sc_camp=<campaign ID>&ec_as=<automation state ID>
  External URL:
  http://<your site>/sitecore/RedirectUrlPage.html?link=<external url>/&sc_camp=<campaign ID>&ec_as=<automation state ID>

Issues resolved:

Performance and Dispatch issues:

• An issue which caused ECM to send blank mails in case when server is overloaded has been fixed (369356).
• An issue which causes users to not be able to resume the dispatch successfully after a system restart or crash while the dispatch in queuing operation, this been fixed (361560).
• A scalability issue when using multiple dedicated e-mail servers, which could cause SQL deadlocks has been fixed (365476).

Issues related to the Sitecore App Center :

• Overall improvements in interfacing with the App Center and avoiding any unnecessary calls to the Email Delivery service (SAC) (369185, 369211 and 369297).
• Fixes in handling bounces and processing the right number of bounced messages with the correct dates and avoiding loading the SAC servers by calling for bounced messages once a day (369224).

Other resolved issues:

• Now the E-mail Campaign Manager roles "ECMAdvancedUsers" and "ECMUsers" inherit rights from the "AnalyticsReporting" and "AnalyticsMaintaining" roles (364601).
• An issue which causes an empty Email field when importing users has been fixed (365489).
• Now a warning message will appear before dispatch start if the sitecore license does not support using a "local MTA" (366458).
• Visits traffic type will be updated for auto created campaigns (374271).

May 3, 2012

The E-mail Campaign Manager v1.3.2 rev.120424 is released.

Tested with Sitecore CMS 6.5.0 rev.111230 (Update-3) and CMS 6.5.0 rev.120420 (Update-4).

Due to the performance issue resolved in this update we highly recommend that customers who use Email Campaign Manager 1.3.2  install this update.

Compatibility
This version of the module runs on Sitecore CMS 6.5 Update-3 or later, CMS 6.6 Update-2 and up to CMS 6.6 Update-6.

Change log.

Issues resolved:

• An issue which caused memory leak during dispatch with specific config settings has been fixed. (363733)
• Issues causing mail (SMTP) connections to occasionally be unreliable have been fixed. (358401)
• An issue which caused the name of a message attachment to be displayed incorrectly when multiple versions or languages exist has been fixed. (356901).
• An incorrect label for the “Send Email Campaign Message” action in the Engagement Plan has been fixed. (363906)
• An issue which caused a subject test to fail if you edit the message being tested in Page Editor, while the test is running, has been fixed. (363730)

March 19, 2012

The E-mail Campaign Manager v1.3.2 rev.120307 is released.

Tested with Sitecore CMS 6.5.0 rev.111230 (Update-3).

Compatibility
This version of the module runs on Sitecore CMS 6.5 Update-3 or later, CMS 6.6 Update-2 and up to CMS 6.6 Update-6.

Change log.

New features:

• The key feature of this update is the Performance Measurement Tool, which is designed to give developers or administrators a view into the performance of an E-mail campaign based on current configuration settings.  
• ECM 1.3.2 provides a new setting which lets you run a single dispatch in emulation mode.

Issues resolved:

• Performance and Dispatch issues
  • An issue which caused slow message rendering in cases where there are many "Sitecore Client User" roles has been fixed. (356407)
  • Subscription confirmation and notification messages are now sent in Live mode. (358144)
• Message configuration issues
  • An issue which caused a standard message to be displayed with Japanese text after moving it from the Newsletter Example folder to the Drafts folder. (350035)
  • An ”Edit Engagement Plan” button is now present on the Message Preview tab for Standard Messages. (357880)
• Potential security vulnerabilities
  • A potential vulnerability in external links in messages has been fixed.  (362124)
  • A potential vulnerability could allow unauthenticated users to use the Upload File page has been fixed. (362125)
• Reporting & logging issues
  • An issue sometimes causing an unhandled exception appear in logs has been fixed. (358249)

December 20, 2011

The E-mail Campaign Manager v1.3.1 rev.111202 is released.

Tested with Sitecore CMS 6.5.0 rev.110818 (Update-1) and 6.5.0 rev.111123 (Update-2).

Compatibility
This version of the module runs on Sitecore CMS 6.5 (except for CMS 6.5 Update-6), CMS 6.6 Update-2 and up to CMS 6.6 Update-6.

Change log.

New features:

• Email Preview
  You can preview how your email messages are displayed in different email clients before you dispatch them using the Email Preview service, available through the Sitecore App Center. You can also select which specific email clients you want to see previews for. 
   
• Spam Detection
  You can now test how likely it is your message will be caught in a spam filter, using the Spam Detect service, available through Sitecore App Center. The Spam Detect service tests your message against a large number of common spam filters, informs you whether the message would pass or fail that spam filter, along with messages to help you adjust you subject and body to increase the likelihood of passing the spam filter. For some spam filters scores are also available. The Spam Detect functionality also supports subject testing. 
   
• The Email Campaign Manager is now fully verified and supported with .NET v. 4. (352085)
   
• A new role (sitecore\ECM Users) was designed for less technical ECM users.

Important changes:

• The ShowExactSubscribersNumber setting has been added to the ECM configuration file. It specifies whether to show an approximate or exact number of subscribers in UI. Showing exact numbers of subscribers may have a performance overhead, and for some environments showing approximate numbers may be more efficient. (341786)
   
• The Already Unsubscribed setting was added as a field of a Target Audience item. It specifies the page displayed when a visitor who has already unsubscribed to the message tries to unsubscribe again. You can use this if you want to use a different page from the one supplied by default. (343148, 343150)
   
• The log message written when the module item structure is corrupted has been improved and now contains the context item ID. (337308)

Issues resolved:

• An issue causing dispatch to fail in some cases, when the Common Opt-Out role was not set has been fixed (334389)
• The rights of the sitecore\ECM Advanced User role have been expanded to ensure all aspects of the Email Campaign manager can be accessed from the Content Editor. (335136)
• An issue which caused the Import Users wizard to fail for all users if it encountered an exception has been fixed. (339581)
• An issue which may cause users to be redirected to a wrong Final Confirmation page during the subscription process when EmailCampaignClientService was enabled has been fixed (341314).
• An issue which caused some bounces related to failed addresses not be tracked in some cases has been fixed. (345749)
• An issue which caused the Email Campaign Manager to be displayed incorrectly, the first time a user opens the application in Safari has been fixed. (347482)
• An issue meaning the Engagement Plan Designer could not be opened if the Email Campaign Manager was started from Page Editor has been fixed. (349809)
• An issue which cause the Send Standard Message action in Web Forms for Marketers to fail in some cases when using the Email Delivery service, available through Sitecore App Center,  was used has been fixed. (351061)
• An issue which meant it was not possible to edit the message subject when accessing the Email Campaign Manager as a non-admin user, without adding additional security rights.(351886)
• An issue which meant Message preview did not always reflect the latest changes in some cases has been fixed. (354143)
• An issue which may cause users to be redirected to a wrong Final Confirmation page during the subscription process when LinkManager is configured in a certain way. (348612)

July 8, 2011

The E-mail Campaign Manager v1.3.0 rev.110707 is released.

Tested with Sitecore CMS 6.5.0 rev.110602.

Compatibility
This version of the module runs on Sitecore CMS 6.5 (except for CMS 6.5 Update-6), CMS 6.6 Update-2 and up to CMS 6.6 Update-6.

Change log.

New features:

Integration with CMS 6.5 and DMS 2.0

• Support for CMS 6.5 and DMS 2.0 has been added.
• All analytics reporting and information has been optimized to work with the new DMS 2.0 Analytics API.
• An engagement automation plan is now used to manage the dispatch process of the email campaign and track the behavior of the recipients of the message. This gives added flexibility to extend and modify individual campaigns based on the status of the dispatch process and the visitor’s behavior.
• The Engagement Automation Monitor can now be used for reporting on the status and behavior of visitors in the email campaign. This replaces the Delivery Statistics and Visit Analysis reports.
• The Executive Insight Dashboard provides detailed Engagement Analytics reporting for campaigns.  The following Executive Insight Dashboard reports are now available for individual email campaigns allowing you to analyze the engagement value of your email campaign:
  • Visits
  • Entry Pages (replaces the Link Analysis report)
  • Assets Consumed
  • Conversion Goals (replaces the Conversion Summary report).
• Message subject testing now uses the A/B testing functionality of CMS 6.5, which uses engagement value to analyze and suggest a test winner.
• A new message subject testing result dialog is available to make it easier to select a test winner.
• An “Edit email audience” Engagement Automation action is now available for use in engagement plans. This allows you subscribe visitors to (or unsubscribe from) one or more Email Campaign Target Audiences.
• A “Send Email Campaign Message ” Engagement Automation action is now available for use in engagement plans. This allows you to send visitors an ECM Standard Message.
• A “Click Email Link” goal has been added for use in Engagement Analytics, Rules, or Engagement Plans. This goal is converted when a user clicks on a link in an email campaign message.

Email Delivery

• ECM 1.3 provides native 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.

Other new features

• Support has been added for browsers other than Internet Explorer. The following browsers are now supported:
  • Internet Explorer 8
  • Mozilla Firefox 3.6
  • Google Chrome 12
  • Safari 5.0.2
• You are now able to add and track links to external websites in your email campaign messages. These external links are mapped to a redirect page on your website so that you can track when recipients click on these links.
• ECM 1.3 has Japanese localization available in the default installation package.

Important changes:

• The following settings have been moved from the web.config file to the ECM configuration file (\App_Config\Include\Sitecore.EmailCampaign.config):
  • IIS User
  • IIS Password
  • Debug
  • Confirmation Period
  • Roles In Roles
• 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)
• The upper limit on mails sent during performance tests has been removed. (338826, 344186)
• An issue which caused messages to fail to be sent if a subscriber has 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 messaged when a dispatch is resumed after having been paused. (344413)

Message  configuration issues

• An issue which prevented tokens from being inserted in the Rich Text Editor, if they were preceded by any text or images has been fixed.(337966)
• An issue which caused links to images which contain spaces paths not to work correctly has been fixed.( 343695)

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 send failures for messages in a Target Audience which has been serialized and moved to another solution and then deserialized. (343973)

2.  Known issues

This page contains the known issues that were found in ECM 1.3. The lowermost section contains the issues that are valid for all ECM 1.3 updates and other sections contain issues that are valid only for specific ECM updates.

The list of known issues that are present only in ECM 1.3.3.

1. Dispatches will be paused if two or more messages have been scheduled to be sent at the same time (373190).
   Note: Note: This known issue was fixed in CMS 6.6 Update-4.
   Description:
   When the dispatch of two or more messages has been scheduled for exactly the same time (in minutes), then some of the dispatches will be paused.
    
2. On CMS 6.5 Update–5 sent message won’t be moved to the “Clicked Through Message” state of Engagement Plan (372644).
   Workaround:
   Contact the Customer Service and request hotfix 372193. 
    
3. First sent message with external links won’t be moved to the "Click Through Message" state of Engagement Plan. (375121)
   Workaround:
   1) Create any test message under some Target Audience and send it to an appropriate test user. (The case is that there must be at least one Engagement Plan item under /sitecore/system/Marketing Center/Engagement Plans/Email Campaign/Emails folder).
   2) Publish the /sitecore/system/Marketing Center/Engagement Plans/Email Campaign/Emails folder or perform a smart publish for the whole site.
   3) External links in all future messages will function correctly.
    
4. On Sitecore CMS 6.6 Update–2, when a recipient clicks an internal link in the received mail, a superfluous empty row is inserted into the Pages table of the Analytics database (376951).
   This issue has been resolved in Sitecore CMS 6.6 Update-3.
   Workaround:
   Contact the Customer Service and request hotfix 376951.  

The list of known issues that are present only in ECM 1.3.2.

1. Horizontal and vertical scrolls  bars are displayed on target audience's icons that has long word in German translation. (362441)

The list of known issues that are present only in ECM 1.3.1.

1. Subscription confirmation/notification messages are not sent in Live mode (358144)
   Note: This known issue was fixed in ECM 1.3.2 rev.120307.
    
   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);

The list of known issues that are present in all ECM 1.3 updates (including the initial release).

1. Some of items in Core database do not have Japanese versions after upgrading the module with the help of the update package. (357403) 
2. Message subject testing cannot be performed on the “HTML” and “Plain Text” email campaign message types.
3. Redirect links from the received message doesn't work if "http://" prefix is not part of the URL field. (362595)
4. Problem with 'ChilkatDotNet2' assembly on 32 bit PC. (331674)
   Description: The exception appears during teamwork, when one member installs ECM, commits the changes to SVN, and another member tries to launch the solution after updating the local copy.
   Workaround: Change the ChilkatDotNet2.dll (in the website/bin folder) with an appropriate one in accordance with configuration of the application pool. In case you use “Enable 32-bit Applications” = “true” in the app pool configuration, use 32 bit version of ChilkatDotNet2.dll (you can find it in Bin_x86 folder).