Tutorial for hivetec Mail Campaigner

Tutorial (English)
Tutorial (Deutsch)

hivetec Mail Campaign Manager can mail thousands of emails in a matter of seconds and allows swift and no frills management of your email campaigns.
Core features are:

Works with Standard eMail formats, plain html or plain text format
Ease of Use, no manual required
Automatic Bounce Management
One Click Opt-In/Opt-Out
Double Opt-In/Opt-Out
Full Success Control & Statistics (OpenTrack, ClickTrack, Bounce Analysis)
Full personalization of Campaigns (permitting custom structure per subscription database)
Multilingual Frontend for Subscribers. Web interfaces and Emails auto-adjust to preferred language.
Flexible & Affordable Pricing

All configuration is automatically preset and may be overwritten by configuration file code or settings.
All files and data will be stored in a dedicated area on your server.
You may at any time click the "Show Tutorial" button to see online instructions. Clicking "Hide Tutorial" hides the online instructions.

For quality control, any mailing campaigns should be preceded by a test sending the mail only to yourself before you mail them to all subscribers in a list. Use the "Send Test Mail" button to test your campaigns before mailing out.

After installation, you should see some sample mail messages and subscription lists.
As a good beginners practice, edit the subscription lists provided as samples and add some email addresses for playing around and testing.

Mail Messages & Subscriptions lists - formats and handling:

Mail messages may have 3 different common formats: html, plain text or any RFC standard encoded mail format.
Mail messages can include embedded or linked images.

You can create and then save nicely formatted mail message files with Thunderbird, Outlook, MS Live, Apple Mail, many other mail apps or simply use MS Word or OpenOffice.

How to import your mails to hivetec Mail Campaign Manager?

You have 2 choices:

Send your new mail message to Newsletter@hivetec.net and get it imported as a mail campaign template by simply adding "import:" preceding the message subject line.

Save your mail message file as either .eml or .html file and then upload the file into hivetec Mail Campaign Manager.

Hint: If you create mails using a mail app, your mails may include any amount of addresses in To:, CC, or BCC fields.
Such embedded email addresses will be auto imported and saved to a subcription with same base name as the mail message file uploaded.
Import or upload a mail file created with a mail app, then click Update & check Values to extract address data from the new mail message file.

Subscription Lists

should contain at subscriber names and email addresses. The basic format is subsciber name <subsriber@Domain.com>.
The minimum requirement is email address per line.
There are 2 kinds of Subscription lists: "Public" and "Private". Only public lists will be shown automatically in subscription forms.
Addresses may be invalidated with a preceding "#" or "//". Any text behind "#" or "//" will be ignored
New message and new subscriber lists may be created and edited by assigning a name into the input area. Mail Messages and subscriber lists may also be uploaded from your local device like PC or laptop.
Sender email address, sender name and subject line are auto-extracted from the selected message file if left empty. If a message file contains To, CC or BCC address data, a new subscription list will be auto-created from the message file.
Such auto-created subscription lists are tagged as "Private Subscription List" and will not be shown when opening http://hivetec.net/mailmanager/opt-in.php or http://hivetec.net/mailmanager/opt-out.php without specifying any subscriptions.

Personalizing Mails:

A mail message may contain common placeholders like [NAME], [EMAIL] or [SUBJECT]. These will be replaced by the name of recipient if provided with listed email address, by the plain address or by the subject set for a mailing.

Advanced personalization of subscriber data formats is supported.

Individual fields names are created using this format:
//ADDRESS|HELLO|PHONE
"Daryl Bender" <darylbender@yahoo.com>|Hey Mate|361 55441324
"Brian Cortes" <Info@briancortez.com>|Dear Mr. Cortez|+43 30 5555-334
"Mike Miller" <Mike@Miller.com>>|Hi Mike|202 445-555
"Susan Silk" <susan33@googlemail.com>|Hello susan|361 55441324

Explanation: 3 fields ADDRESS, HELLO and PHONE were defined. The field separator is "|" or ",".
These fields may all or partly be used by your mail messages.
Next add placeholders to the mail message which should use the data defined.
Pleceholders are enclosed by square brackets [PLACEHOLDER].
The placeholders for above defined 3 field names look like this: [ADDRESS], [HELLO] and [PHONE].

Starting Campaigns:

Campaigns may run as foreground jobs with every single mail sending status displayed on screen, or as background tasks. Multiple background tasks may run simultanously!

Statistics

Campaign Statistics is displayed in a table on the upper right side of your screen.
You may any time view the database yourself by clicking the Statistics link.

Tracking and Success Control

2 types of tracking are available: Open Tracking and Click Tracking.
Click here for more information about tracking features.

Automatic Bounce Management:

Bounce handling is very simple. Bounce handling is configured by an editable configuration file config.php, which is shown right on start page. The config file can be used to add additional bounce rules. Samples are provided.
Bounce Management distinguishes 4 classes of bounces:

Invalid addresses - Are tagged NotExist, stored in the database and will be permanently blocked from receiving further mails.
Rejected deliveries- Are tagged Rejected, stored in the database and will be blocked from receiving mails for 1 month. There are various reason for rejects, most of them will be a result mail server errors or non-standard anti-spam measures.
Banned addresses - These rejected your mails as spam. They will be tagged Banned, stored in the database and blocked from receiving mails for 1 month.
Over Quota - Your mails were rejected because recipient account is over quota. Addresses will be tagged Full, stored in the database and blocked from receiving mails for 1 day.
Auto Responders - These are automatic replies like "Out of Office" etc. They will be tagged OutOffice, counted and deleted.

Inbox
Whenever you click this button, your bounce mail inbox at Newsletter@hivetec.net is being manually checked and analyzed.
All regular emails found in your mailbox at Newsletter@hivetec.net will be left untouched.
When bounces are processed, you see some statistic information and detailed lists of all mails stored in your mail account inbox. Mail accounts and mails user settings are retrieved by user login and can be edited in config file.
After storing bounce details to bounce database, all bounces will be deleted and other mails may be viewed as source code. Any mail may be deleted manually.
Remaining mails may then eiher forward to $forwardMailbox (defined on config file) by clicking that button or use the WebMail button above to manage your mails.

Bounces
You can view and remove any emails in bounce database by clicking this button.
If you click the button disable non-existing adresses in all subscriber lists, invalid addresses will be disabled in subscriber list files.
Information about mail server: smtp reply codes

Log files

To the right of your subscription list you see some log files listed:
bounces.log: Processed bounced emails with detail information.
bounced.emails.log: INVALID email addresses which are now being blocked!
bouncepattern.stats.log: Bouncepattern Statistics mailings.log: Mailing campaigns with detail data
subscribed.log: Opt-In confirmed and auto-added subscribers
unsubscribed.log: Opt-Out confirmed and auto-removed subscribers

Opt-In/Opt-Out - Anti-Spam Measures & Good Mail Campaign Guidelines

Never ever send unsolicited email to any body. Make sure that all recipients in a subscription list have subscribed to receive your mail campaigns or newsletters!

When using the subscription web forms, hivetec Mail Campaign Manager uses Double Opt-In to confirm subscribing to and Double Opt-Out for unsubscribing from a subscription.
Only when Opt-In or Opt-Out requests are coming from mail campaigns, 1-Click Opt-in / Opt-Out is enabled!
All requests to subscribe or unsubscribe need be confirmed by email!
This is called Double Opt-In/Opt-Out and is legally required by EU laws and many national laws. It is also a matter of netiquette to make sure anyone can always demand you delete their private data and that nobody is forced to receive unwanted emails. When confirmed, subscriber database and selected subscriptions will be automatically updated.

To comply with data privacy and antispam regulations, avoid sending unsolicited mails!
You need to add an Unsubscribe button to all your campaigns.
The tag you need to add to your mail file is very simple: Just put [UNSUBSCRIBE] anywhere inside your mail content area, preferably on bottom of your mail content. When using this tag inside a mail file, a link to unsubscribe will be created and subscribers id reference will be automatically added to the link! You may also create a direct link using this format: http://hivetec.net/mailmanager/opt-out.php?subscription=Our Newsletter
Providing an unsubscribe link will allow your recipients to unsubscribe themselves from your subscription based mail campaigns. Not offering this button may result in your email getting classified as spam!
You may also use a subscribe - button to allow people to subscribe to your mailing campaigns.
The tag you need to add to your mail file is very simple: Just put [SUBSCRIBE] anywhere inside your mail content area.
Alternatively, a direct link can be used: http://hivetec.net/mailmanager/opt-in.php&subscription=Our Newsletter. New subscribers are listed in added to the subscribers database and to a file "subscribe.log". They will be automatically added to the subscription list they opted in to.
Unsubscribers are listed in a file unsubscribe.log and are automatically deleted from the subscription they opted out from.
You may also subscribe/unsubscribe automatically by providing email address, subscriber name and subscription in the format:
http://hivetec.net/mailmanager/opt-out.php?name=Subscriber&email=subscriber@Domain.com&subscription=Our Newsletter

The subscription form will be auto-generated when you OPT-In/Out system is used first time.
You may completly customize the subscription form template by double clicking on subscription form tag in Configuration box bottom right on Main Page. The form will provide a selection of all your public subscriptions or shows only subscriptions posted to it as explained above. You should also customize header and footer templates you see in the same box.
Doing that should be part of your initial configuration steps.