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Gmail Integration With DAP

WARNING: Gmail integration may not work for everyone. Many factors – including, but not limited to, your physical location, the location associated with your Gmail account, location of server, IP address, etc – appear to play a role in whether or not this will work for you with your Gmail account. So please note, that if it doesn’t work for you, then there isn’t anything the DAP team can do to overcome or “fix” that. It’s Google, after all. We don’t know what rules and monitoring they have in place for this. So, if Gmail integration doesn’t work for you, then you may want to consider Amazon SES integration, which has a 100% success rate with DAP users at this time.

To increase deliverability of your autoresponder, broadcast and instant emails (like “Welcome” email), you can make DAP completely by-pass your web host’s email server, and send emails out through third-party email servers, like Gmail or Amazon SES. This article is about setting up DAP to send out emails through Gmail’s email servers.

Sending Email Through Google’s Gmail Servers

Before you start sending out mass emails through Google’s Gmail Servers, please note this…

Sending out emails through Gmail instead of your web host, will surely boost your deliverability, no doubt. But remember that Gmail is NOT meant to use for mass emails. It is not really meant to be used as a list service. Plus they have a very strict restriction of 500 emails per 24-hour period.

You exceed that quota even by one, and they probably will temporarily disable your Gmail account for about 24 hours. Sending a large number of un-deliverable emails (resulting in bounces) could also get your entire Gmail account permanently suspended. And if you lose your Google username, it may (no confirmation available) affect your other Google accounts too – like AdWords or AdSense.

Anyway, DAP has a round-robin emailing system – so you could set up and use multiple Gmail accounts – each with its own 500 email limit per day – and combine them to send out a larger broadcast. However, remember – we’re talking about Google here – which means they can suspend/cancel/delete your account for any reason at all, even more so when you’re going against their TOS.

So use Gmail with caution, and only for smaller lists. If you want a larger sending email limit, check out the DAP integration with Amazon SES which allows you to send out tens of thousands of emails a day.

  1. Log in to your DAP Admin Panel, and go to DAP Admin > Email > SMTP.
  2. On this screen, use the section Add a New SMTP Serverto create a new SMTP row as follows:Description: Gmail (can be anything really)
    Server: tls://smtp.gmail.com (must be exactly that)
    Port: 465 (must be exactly that)
    SSL: N (must be exactly that)
    User Id: youremail@gmail.com (your gmail email id)
    Password: yourpassword (your gmail password)
    Email Sending Limit Per Hour: 500 (don’t go more – less is ok)
  3. Click on the Add button to create and save the new Gmail SMTP server setting.
  4. Once it is saved, now you will see 2 rows on the screen: One for “Localhost”, and the other is the new “Gmail”.
  5. Towards the end of each row, you’ll see a setting called “Activated?”. Set it to “N” for Localhost and “Y” for Gmail.
  6. That will now make all of your outgoing emails (listed below) go out only through Gmail, totally bypassing your web host’s email server. Which means, your email deliverability will go up substantially.
  7. List of outgoing emails for which your Gmail account will be used, include:
    – Real-time Welcome Emails
    – Third-party Notification Emails (to Admin, other third-parties, Aweber, etc)
    – All notification and transactional emails to DAP Admin – like payment receipt, new user signup, error notifications, user unsubscription notifications, etc
    – All autoresponder and broadcast emails
    – etc…

 

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.

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.

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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.