Email Campaigns - more and more bugs, why QA cannot reproduce any?!?! amazed.

[jasonslater2000]

using Sugar Pro 4.5.0f

I have serious doubts about whether companies really use Sugar features like Email Campaigns for production use. For the first year of using Sugar, I accepted the low quality. However, as time has rolled on, Sugar adds pointless things like forums before fixing buggy features that businesses need to work (and reliably). The buggy scheduler, mails not sent, empty mails, etc., etc. etc. Is there no end to this? If this quality continues to be so low, there is no way I will renew my Sugar licenses.

Each time I have upgraded Sugar, for the past 3 or 4 updates, more and more bugs. for most of the bugs below, there is no mention. Every time I update, I need to spend days pouring through the log files to see why feature XXX doesn't work this time. Without fail.

Hey, I pay for support with the Pro version.... Why don't I just submit a bug for each thing? The only time Sugar seems to fix bugs is if I include fixed code with the bug. How is that for support?

Just a few campaign- / email-related bugs I'm running into now -

(1) Empty-bodied emails when using Firefox as Sugar client.

(2) Email attachments - Sugar documents work, but on-the-fly are not. Sugar tries to locate them in the PHP temp directory rather than in its own cache directory.

(3) Campaign email send date (send_date_time) set to = 1996-08-15 07:00:00. Does this mean that recipients may never see your email, since it was tagged as sent in 1996? Or your ISP will reject/blackhole email as spam automatically with an invalid send date?

(4) Misleading/buggy campaign/outgoing account usage:
Set up account to use via Administration / Email Settings - this is documented as being used for Notifications
Set up account to use for campaign via Administration / Users. Acct uses SMTP & authentication.
Configured inbound email for campaign account for bounce detection.
Configured campaign to use this email account, tried sending.
Authentication error in SugarPHPMailer, since it is using the notification account to send campaign emails for some unknown reason.

(5) Campaign test emails are now being sent via scheduler - should not be happening, didn't use to be this way - this means you can't repeat a test email without creating a new campaign or manually deleting the sent record via SQL.

(6) Empty campaign template emails being sent

(7) Campaign emails not reliably sent - intermittent send errors, often unreported and unlogged by Sugar. Send 1000, maybe 300-400 actually get sent. No, I don't mean they got filtered as spam, they never actually get sent even though Sugar says they did.

(8) Email account set up for bounce handling consistently loses this setting and switches to "Create [Any]" after editing that user's configuration -- this silently resets the inbound handling configured on eparate Inbound Email admin page. This breaks email campaigns each time.

(9) HTML campaign emails which previously were sent as HTML now are not, despite User Email Defaults set to use HTML Email and composing an HTML email for the campaign.

(10) Emails now consistently end up in Outlook "Junk E-mail" folder, whereas two revisions of Sugar ago, they didn't.

SUGAR Folks! Stop adding endless stupid features and make your software work.

[andydreisch]

Hi jasonslater2000, I've forwarded your comments along to the Dev and QA teams, and to our Mktg team for their comments as well as they use CampMgt constantly (as does the Online team for our newsletters).

You'd probably not be surprised to learn that we do not encounter many/most of the issues you raise. But ... we're not saying that problems don't exist in the Email/CampMgt areas. In fact, the 450g and, now, 450h versions addressed many email-related issues reported by the Sugar community.

Bugs fixed in 450g
Bugs fixed in 450h

We encourage you to move to 450h. But realize that we're not merely pushing the problem along -- we recognize the importance these functions play in day-to-day business.

Please keep your input coming. We appreciate it. (We really do!)

Andy

[jag7720]

(3) Campaign email send date (send_date_time) set to = 1996-08-15 07:00:00. Does this mean that recipients may never see your email, since it was tagged as sent in 1996? Or your ISP will reject/blackhole email as spam automatically with an invalid send date?

I'm using Version 4.5.1f (Build 1094) and I still have that issue. How can I get this resolved?

[jag7720]

<gentle BUMP>

when I grep for 1996 I get this

modules/Campaigns/QueueCampaign.php:

$send_date_time="'".gmdate("Y-m-d H:i:s", mktime(0,0,0,8,15,1996))."'";

[lurkerfilms]

Campaigns simply don't work especially for non-email campaigns.

1.Targets are unusable, not associated with a campaign when "Mark as Sent" is executed.

2. No way to manually associate target with campaign in the "Campaign Log" subsection of a target.

3. No way to manual change the campaign state of target, lead, or contact that is associated with a campaign

4. No way to make target/lead/contact as "bad address" for mailing campaign.

5. Interface should be simplified so that targets/leads/contacts can be manually selected in batch and move from one stage to another within the context of a campaign.

Currently if we use leads and not targets we can manually add leads to a campaign but statistics for a campaign do not show correctly conversions.

I have verified this still doesn't work in the on-line 5.0 demo so I doubt this functionality has ever worked.

[heytimc]

We'd like to echo these concerns. Opensource isn't worth a damn if it can't do the job and a marketing director will tell you they don't care about worthy aims about OS. If it don't work it won't shift product.

The campaign module has great potential and is way more important than the introduction of "eye candy" on the home page (dashlets) or better charts. No point reporting anything if you can't get the prospects into the pipeline.

Please, don't bother trying to compete with Outlook/Exchange - except in so far as you could try to replicate easy to use Rules for campaigns, for example to set up autoreplies , Thanks for looking etc that are email based and not web-based redirect pages. Even power users don't want to get that stuck into making web pages.

So just to emphasise, email campaigns and webinars are the future of progressive marketing and are a must, must must in a good CRM system.

PS: Oh and yes, when will PostreQL become the standard database platform?

PPS: Keep up the good work.

[susiewilliams]

Hi all,

We have asked our Product Management team to comment on the issues raised in this thread. Here is what they said (numbers correspond to lurkerfilms' post earlier in this thread):

1. ("Targets are unusable, not associated with a campaign when "mark as sent" is executed) PM has changed the priority to Urgent, and has assigned the bug to be fixed in 5.0.0.patch.
2. ("No way to manually associate target w/campaign in the "Campaign Log" subsection of a target") The way to associate targets with campaigns is through the campaign. This makes sense to me. I’m not sure what the use case would be to associate targets with campaigns without marking the campaign as sent for non-campaign emails and without actually sending the email campaign.
3. ("No way to manually change the campaign state of target, lead or contact that is associated with a campaign") This is done through the Mark as Sent button which is currently not working (see #1).
4. ("No way to make target/lead/contact as 'bad address' for mailing campaign") Currently, the only way to filter targets is for email campaigns to use the Opt Out feature.
5. ("Interface should be simplified so that targets/leads/contacts can be manually selected in batch and move from one stage to another within the context of a campaign") This is a viable feature request. I'd encourage the user to add this to the Feature Requests area in the forums or use Bug Tracker to log the request.

[stevec]

I wanted to add to the item #4. I believe lurkerfilm was referring to the bounce handler not setting contacts/prospects and lead records' 'invalid email' field as true when a bounce for that address is received. In the file modules/Campaigns/ProcessBouncedEmails.php, there is the lines:

		} else {
			//todo mark the email address as invalid. search for prospects/leads/contact associated
			//with this email address and set the invalid_email flag... also make email available.
		}

It's been like this a while - there are quite a few posts in the forums for workarounds for this but nothing in the standard source.


Also, for Jason Slater, re issue #5

"Campaign test emails are now being sent via scheduler - should not be happening, didn't use to be this way - this means you can't repeat a test email without creating a new campaign or manually deleting the sent record via SQL."

You can sent test campaigns on the fly via the "Campaign Wizard" link on the campaign detail view - options to "send test" and "schedule". After the campaign is created, the wizard lets you modify and process the campaign.

[stevec]

Hi,

I have to further add that we are also having a hellish time with campaigns. Our main problem is with bounce handling. The system has been set up for a specific circumstance only - with it only identifying bounces using single criteria and assuming the bounced message is quoted and not attached,

The case I had for this was supposed to be resolved via bugs fixed in 4.5.1h but these were only workarounds for other specific instances. In our case, bounces are from user MDAEMON and not MAILER-DAEMON (a simple hack to fix for ourselves). However, the biggest problem is in the attachment handling of the bounced message - where the current code does not handle the appropriate mime-type and encodings to process the attachment. We're spent a deal of time coding around this but it's still in testing and we're not sure if it will work in all circumstances.

I would have thought bounce handling would have been properly developed and tested in an email campaign system - it appears to have been developed and tested against a single instance of a specific SMTP relay and not thought through as a general process.

[lurkerfilms]

We have asked our Product Management team to comment on the issues raised in this thread. Here is what they said (numbers correspond to lurkerfilms' post earlier in this thread):

Thank you for replying! I've been struggling with this for months wondering if the process was just so obfuscated that I couldn't figure out how to use it or if it was broken. Comments below...

• ("Targets are unusable, not associated with a campaign when "mark as sent" is executed) PM has changed the priority to Urgent, and has assigned the bug to be fixed in 5.0.0.patch.

Great!

• ("No way to manually associate target w/campaign in the "Campaign Log" subsection of a target") The way to associate targets with campaigns is through the campaign. This makes sense to me. I’m not sure what the use case would be to associate targets with campaigns without marking the campaign as sent for non-campaign emails and without actually sending the email campaign.

I think it is a ease of use feature and also consistency... you can manually add leads to a campaign, why can't you manually add targets? Seems much more straight forward to 1. create the one-off target, 2. in the view page of the target scroll down to campaign log and add it manually to a specific campaign (especially if it needs to be add to multiple campaigns (workflow). "Mark as sent" is obscure in comparison, it is not clear what the button does (and in the current state, it does nothing).

It would be far more useful for us who do mostly non-email campaigns if we could set the stage of targets (or contacts) in the campaign en masse e.g. bulk edit. I want to select the set of targets or contacts or whatever and "Mark As" ... [Invalid Address, Shipped, Followup, Converted, etc.]. Then when I do statistics for the campaign I actually get useful information.

Currently if I convert a lead manually I have no way of crediting the campaign (nothing happens if I assign a campaign to it ... I assume this was for conversion credit). Then once I have a contact that is going through multiple campaigns. How do I mark or give credit to a campaign for the opportunity.

None of this functionally appears to be there.

The simple scenario we are trying to model is sending our physical review copies and tracking, interest, and whether or not reviews have been written.

1. ("No way to manually change the campaign state of target, lead or contact that is associated with a campaign") This is done through the Mark as Sent button which is currently not working (see #1).

I urge you to reconsider this position. Make it consistent with Leads. Why not allow a user to manually add a target to a campaign... it works with our workflow much better, makes more sense , and makes the interface consistent.

1. ("No way to make target/lead/contact as 'bad address' for mailing campaign") Currently, the only way to filter targets is for email campaigns to use the Opt Out feature.

You should expose a simple interface to allow us non-email campaigners to mark the targets/leads with all legal states/stages of a campaign e.g. bad address, etc. Maybe you don't want to expose this functionality to the open source version but it makes the system next to useless for us. Based on the open source community version (which has many nice features) I wouldn't update to the professional/paid version.

Make the interface general so it works for all kinds of campaigns.

It is clear that non-email campaigns was a major after thought and not thought through.

• ("Interface should be simplified so that targets/leads/contacts can be manually selected in batch and move from one stage to another within the context of a campaign") This is a viable feature request. I'd encourage the user to add this to the Feature Requests area in the forums or use Bug Tracker to log the request.

I will do so.

Thanks for all the fish.