Mailing List Tools

CustomMailer includes a set of mailing list tools which can greatly assist certain setup and maintenance tasks that arise in email campaigns. These include:

1. a wizard to help you set up and verify your Internet SMTP connection
2. a tool for testing whether your mailing list addresses are valid prior to sending email to them
3. a tool for finding duplicate addresses (or other duplicate values) in your mailing list
4. a tool for finding addresses in your mailing list that match addresses in a file (such as a "remove" or "suppress" or "opt-out" file, or a file containing "bounceback" emails)
5. a tool for extracting email addresses out of any file (such as a file containing "subscribe" or "opt-out" emails or an address book)
6. support for a permanent list of "opt-out" email addresses to whom mail will never be sent

SMTP Setup Wizard

The SMTP Setup Wizard lets you test your Internet connection to verify that it is working, find your SMTP server name if you do not know what it is, test whether your SMTP server requires SMTP Authentication (name & password), and finally send email to test that your SMTP server works properly from CustomMailer. It is invoked by the "SMTP Setup Wizard" command under the "Tools" menu and runs automatically the very first time you use CustomMailer (or any time the SMTP server name is left blank in Preferences).

The wizard is very self-explanatory. It begins by verifying that your Internet connection is working. It does this by trying to open socket connections at certain public Internet sites. It should verify your connection in just a few seconds. Otherwise puts up a warning that the connection did not respond right away, but keeps trying for about a minute before giving up entirely. If during the minute you reestablish your connection, the wizard will detect this and proceed normally, or you can just hit "Quit" and try again.

Next you will be asked for your SMTP server name. If you know it, you can enter it here and CustomMailer will proceed to test it out. If you don't know it, you can enter the Internet domain name of your company or Internet Service Provider and CustomMailer has a way of using Internet DNS services to find out some possible SMTP servers for you to use. You can enter any one of these names and CustomMailer will test it out to see if it is suitable for your use.

Once you have an SMTP server name, CustomMailer will verify that the server is available and responding properly. In the process it may determine that your SMTP server is one of those that requires SMTP authentication. In this case you will need to enter a name and password to satisfy your SMTP server. This name and address should have been provided to you by your network administrator, who set up your server to require SMTP authentication in the first place (you can usually tell if you need to use SMTP authentication based on the setup of your regular email program, see "SMTP authentication" under the "Mailer Server" section of "Preferences"). Once the SMTP Setup Wizard has your name and password and has tested that it works, it will automatically set these values in Preferences if you like.

NOTE: we know of cases where SMTP servers say they support SMTP authentication but don't actually require it. If you suspect this is your situation, try leaving the name and password blank and see if the test message works. If so, you may be able to turn SMTP authentication off in Preferences and still send mail.

Finally, the SMTP Setup Wizard will use what it has learned to send an actual email to provide the ultimate test. The wizard will ask you for your email address and send a test email to your address and also to our testSMTP@wildcrest.com test address. After a few minutes you can check to see if the test email got sent to you by running your regular email reader. In addition, if the test email sent to testSMTP@wildcrest.com worked OK, the Wildcrest Associates automated reply demon will send back a message which you will also get in your regular email reader informing you that your email message was successfully received by our site. If this test message didn't work correctly, either the wizard will detect this right away or you may later get a "bounceback" email notification in your regular email about what went wrong. Sending the test message both to yourself and to testSMTP@wildcrest.com will verify that your SMTP server can send email both within your domain and relayed outside your domain.

Once the SMTP Setup Wizard has verified that your SMTP server is working correctly, it offers to set your SMTP server name (and, if used, your SMTP authentication name and password) in Preferences. You can skip this step if you just want to test an SMTP server without designating it as the one you actually wish to use.

Verify Addresses

Verify Addresses lets you check in advance the validity of the addresses in a particular mailing list column for all (or some) of your mailing list rows. This command can greatly reduce "bounceback" messages caused by sending email to invalid Internet addresses. The address verifier first tests for legal Internet address syntax in the form username@domain.com. It then determines whether the domain (i.e., domain.com) is a valid Internet domain using the Internet DNS (Domain Name Server) protocol. Finally, it goes to the SMTP server at domain.com and asks whether username is a valid user for receiving mail at that domain (the user will not be aware of this query). Not all SMTP servers validate user names, but you will always find out either that they are a valid user, that they are not a valid user, or that the SMTP server won't say. In our experience, approximately 80% of invalid users or domains can be screened out using this tool.

The email addresses that Verify Addresses will test must be in some column of your mailing list. Verify Addresses will guess what column this is but lets you change it to any other column before beginning the verification.

The email addresses will only be verified for the rows of your mailing list that you select (using row selections made by you in advance in all the normal ways selections of multiple recipients are made within CustomMailer). In this way, you can verify only new addresses added to your list, or just the addresses to which you are about to send a mailing. In addition the Verify Addresses dialog provides a "Select All" button for your convenience since this is the most common option.

The verification is performed by CustomMailer using a multi-threaded verifier so that verification is generally much faster than actually sending email. The results of the verification are entered into the "SendStatus" column of your mailing list. The main result is visible in the "SendStatus" column, with a more detail explanation available if you widen the "SendStatus" column to the right. Here is the exact meaning of the six possible results:

VALID USER - This means that domain.com has been verified as a valid Internet domain and that the SMTP server at that domain has verified that username is a valid username at that address. VALID USER means that you can send email to this address and it should get through.

VALID DOMAIN - This means that domain.com has been verified as a valid Internet domain but that the SMTP server at that domain has responded that it is unwilling to verify whether or not username is a valid username at that address. VALID DOMAIN means that the SMTP server is willing to receive an email sent to this address, and that you should try sending the email since the username may indeed be valid and get through, but also be prepared for the possibility that you get a "bounceback" email informing you that there was no such user at that address after all.

INVALID USER - This means that domain.com has been verified as a valid Internet domain but that the SMTP server at that domain has verified that username is not a valid username at that address. INVALID USER means that you shouldn't bother sending email to this address, as it will only result in a "bounceback" email informing you that there is no such user at that address.

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