Troubleshooting Email Broadcasts

* When you schedule a broadcast email, it’s added to the job queue with a status of NEW
* When the cron job runs at the top of the hour, then the job status changes to COMPLETE (C) and the emails get sent.

So to test it, do this.

  1. set up an email broadcast to a test user using the CSV format (option # 5)
  2. Go to DAP Admin > System > Job Queue and see if the job was added with a status of NEW
  3. Now manually run the cron by running this cron script in a browser (just for testing)
    http://yoursite.com/dap/dap-cron.php (replace yoursite.com with the name of your site)
  4. Then go back to the job queue and see if the status for the email job has changed to ‘C’ (complete)
  5. If yes, check if the email was received.

Troubleshooting “Payload Format Incorrect” Error

If you see this error when trying to send out a broadcast to a default group from the Email > Broadcast page, then the most plausible cause for this is that there are some special, non-standard characters in the body of the email that you’re trying to broadcast.

This could happen if you copied text that you composed in a Microsoft Word doc, or you cut/pasted from a WordPress blog post. And both Word and WordPress (some themes) are famous for creating special characters out of normal characters.

Example:

If you take a closer look at the body of your email, especially the single quotes and double-quotes characters, you will find that these may not be the standard single quote and double quote characters that you get from a plain text editor.

And these special characters trip up the DAP email broadcasting system.

So please take a closer look at all of the following characters:

  • Single quotes
  • Double quotes
  • Hyphens
  • Special symbols like trademark and copyright

And just type over them again just to be sure with the normal equivalent using your keyboard, and try the broadcast again.

And this time, it should work.

Email Body Showing Up Partially On Job Queue

When you view the broadcast emails that you just scheduled on the System > Job Queue page, if you see that the email body in the saved job has been randomly cut off at one point (usually at the point where there would normally be a single or double quote), then that’s also an indication of non-standard characters in the email that you tried to send out. So see the above example for how to weed out any non-standard single or double quotes or hyphens, and try the test again with just one test email, and see if it goes out to just that one email. Because if it fails for one email, then it will fail for all emails being sent via the DAP Broadcast system.

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