Best practices for sending email campaigns in Sugar

[jamesj55]

Hi everyone,

I have recently joined the ranks of people who are very excited about the possibilities of Sugar's open source offering, and convinced my work to let me install it and start to use it. I suppose most of you will know that I let myself into a world of discovery and trial and error! While I think that this is a great tool, there are problems that really get in the way of doing decent business. I am worried for example that the amount of time I am spending on Sugar and the failed email campaigns will ultimately make me look foolish for trying to use Sugar.

That said, it doesn't need to be this way. I think that many would agree that the use of Sugar as a mail management tool is one of it's most attractive features. However, there are some hurdles to overcome in order to make it viable. A tool that is used in the context of business cannot afford to waste time and must be easily understood and usable for deployment across a team. I have found it a struggle to implement and our mail campaigns have been wayward at best, with the most recent batch of invitation emails not being sent at all despite the system telling me that they had been! Not good.

So what can we do about it? Well I am still testing settings, and I believe so are a few of you. I think it is in the interests of all of us who choose to adopt Sugar to post our results and make sure that this tool is usable for business and help others to find the way to use it too, so that it can continue to develop for all of us. I would like to just bullet a few of the issues I have found:

• Using smtp settings to send email campaigns causes errors when another domain address is used as the 'sent from' for the message email campaign. I am now testing an entirely self contained version so that all smtp email settings are from the same server. Will this work? I'll let you know
• Using sendmail gets the scheduled jobs out, but reports suggest that noone actually received the sent emails. Does this mean that the sendmail option is essentially useless. It appears so
• Given that SMTP is probably the only way to go, what server settings etc are necessary to ensure delivery? I want to resolve this issue and will let you know if and when I find out the ansewr

I would like to open this up to the floor and ask all of you and the Sugar team for input, as I think this is a serious enough issue to warrant devotion of energies if Sugar is going to be taken seriously and if we will all then have an ensured open source crm in the future.

Best wishes, and I look forward to your comments,

James.

[SKAAA]

James, thank you for this post and please keep us informed.

I am having daily SMTP and campaign issues also and could fill a document on these. Good news is that I now know what to expect every morning when to come in since they repeat (SMTP error).

[jamesj55]

OK, some more info for you. After a few days of testing I have decided never to use the sendmail option for sending out campaign emails, as it appears in the queue management (Admin -> Manage Email Queue) that your emails have been sent successfully, although the reality is they have not. I'm sure this will be fixed at some point but for now it doesn't work.

I then went back to using smtp. Bear in mind that I am running Sugar from my own root server and have set up an email account on the same server in the same domain to use for sending out emails. At first I used the option to authenticate the email with the user name and password, as well as port 25 and set the server to 'localhost'. This showed up some big problems in the log, which boiled down to not being able to authenticate the smtp server. I took off authentication and voila. For the last week sugar has been sending out the email campaigns successfully at an impressive rate. I now feel very confident in Sugar's capabilities and I hope that if you're experiencing problems with this particular issue, that this will help you to resolve them.

All the best, and if I find out anything else that helps with campaigns (I am excited about the Power Prospecting module in SugarForge) I'll let you know about it.

[jamesj55]

Hello,

I had another small issue with campaigns today, and thought this might come in handy for others. If you are running scheduled jobs, make sure that you set up the scheduler for the bounced emails to run at the same time, otherwise you'll find that your campaign stats won't show you the email addresses that bounced.

[tzambo]

... Bear in mind that I am running Sugar from my own root server ...

We are using the web-hosted version. Anyone having issues with the campaign module on this version? We will be testing it this week but if there is best-practice, we'll gladly take it!