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Category Archives for "Autoresponders"

Strange Characters In Emails

If you or your members are noticing strange characters in emails – especially where there should normally be a single or double quote, then these are due to what are known as “Smart Quotes”.

These special characters always show up when you copy text from a WordPress blog (some themes use these characters) or a Microsoft Word document.

Single quote:

'(correct)

`(incorrect)

Double quote:

" (correct)

`` (incorrect)

The single quote that works correctly is located next to the “Enter” key.

The incorrect one is located next to the “1” number key.

So copy your email text to a text editor, like notepad. Then change all single quotes to be ‘ and all double-quotes to be “ in your emails. Then put them back into DAP, and then test.

The “strange characters” issue should then be resolved.

NOTE: In a future version, we will implement an enhancement in DAP so that DAP can handle this automatically, but for now, the above solution is your only option.

Troubleshooting Cron

The Problem

  • Your autoresponder or broadcast emails are not going out (hourly cron job dap-cron.php)
  • Your Affiliates aren’t being credited with sales (hourly cron job dap-cron.php)
  • Your 1SiteAutomation/1ShoppingCart Orders are not being processed. (10-minute cron job dap-emailorder.php)

The Solution

One possible solution is that your cron job(s) aren’t running correctly.

DAP has two cron jobs. One that runs once an hour (dap-cron.php), and one that runs every 10 minutes (dap-emailorder.php).

You can see how to set them up here.

But in this post, we will see how to make sure your cron is actually set up correctly, or if it’s running correctly.

How To Know If Cron Is Running

  1. Go to System > Logs and click on “Empty Logs”. That will fully clear out all logs.
  2. Go to Setup > Config and set “Log Level” to “Log All Activity (during troubleshooting)” and click “Update“.
  3. Wait for the top of the hour for the hourly cron job to run. So if the time when you’re doing this, is say 11:20 AM, then wait for 12:00 Noon. If time is 3:45 PM, then wait for 4:00 PM.
  4. A few minutes past the top of the hour and go back to the System > Logs screen.
  5. If you see hundreds of lines of text in the logs, then that means your cron job is running correctly. If you only see maybe 10-20 lines of text, then your cron job is NOT running correctly, and you need to make sure the cron job is actually set up correctly.
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Sending HTML Email

DAP allows you to send out HTML content in all of the following:

  1. Double-optin email body
  2. Thank-you email body
  3. Autoresponder email body, and
  4. Broadcast email body

DAP can send out “Multi-part” emails – that is, emails that have both a “text” portion, and an “HTML” portion. If there are any email clients out there that cannot handle HTML email (in the year 2010, there are really no such clients, really), then the “text” portion of the same email will be shown to the recipient.

To send out HTML emails, it is very important that you insert the HTML Email Start Tag – [HTML_START] – into the body of your email before you insert any HTML tags.

The same goes for any email that you want to send out in HTML format: Just before you insert your HTML code, just be sure to insert the HTML Email Start Tag [HTML_START].

And the HTML you insert should be full-blown HTML, starting with the <html><body>…. and ending with </html></body> tags.

NOTE: DAP does not have a built-in editor to create the HTML yet. So you will have to create the HTML code outside of DAP – either using a HTML editor like Dreamweaver, or you could even compose a draft page in WordPress, and use that as the source of your HTML code that you would then use within DAP to send out HTML email.

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