Bizzare behavior from "E-Mail Counts"

For the past month, I've been testing out the "E-Mail Counts" program offered by www.godaddy.com.

This is a web hosted application that handles bulk emailing of newsletters.

It's actually a pretty slick app. It has a great interface, a reasonable price ($ 30 per year), and puts out some very nice looking e-mails.

But, it isn't without its bugs. There are some really annoying bugs in the editor, but they can be worked around

The biggest problem I've had is that some of the e-mails that it generates do not render well in Outlook 2003. But only on some computers!

I talked to their tech support (nice people), but they couldn't figure it out either. They were not running Outlook 2003, so they could not see what I was seeing.

I was gettings sentences like this: thisisthekindofsentencethatIwasgetting.

No spaces. Even when checking the html source code, there were no spaces. But in the same email sent to Outlook XP, it was fine. Send it to hotmail? No problem!

Weird.

Anyway, we'll see if it really works out though. I surely hope so.

Another interesting problem is that the spam killer at WGM headquarters kills SOME of my emails. Just some. Some get through. Others are killed.

And they are identical!

Go figure. AOL is doing the same thing to me.

A visit with a new old friend

For the past few weeks, we've been on the east coast in the Washington, DC, area.

While Beth and Faith (our daughter) hit the malls with Beth's sister and niece, I took a short drive up to south Jersey to meet Doug Thomson.

Doug is a FoxPro programmer who wrote a nice compression utility that I downloaded some time ago that drives the "pack and go" utility and the "live update" utility. He's been a big help in a lot of the programming for some of the recent program updates.

He's also the genius behind the advanced filtering routines that were recently added to the program. He programmed them far better than I would have ever been able to.

So, anyway, I drove up and took this guy out to lunch, and we had a good time getting personally acquainted, having only conversed via e-mail.

Doug's also working on an e-mail utility which I'm hoping will be the engine that talkes to e-mail servers in the new personalize bulk emailing routine that I've been working on.

Here's a pic of Doug, his wife, and their pup Sheba (who had grown a good bit when I was there.

It's off to college for Faith

This past weekend found us travelling to Kentucky to take Faith back to Asbury for her sophmore year: www.asbury.edu.

She's excited and is pumped and ready to go. When we go to Asbury we often stay at WGM's student center (www.asburywgm.org). It's a great place.

Other times we stay with Ron and Bonnie Koteskey. Ron was one of my psych profs at Asbury. He and Bonnie are doing a lot of work in missionary care for WGM, OMS International, the Mission Society for United Methodists, and a number of other organizations.

I helped Ron a bit with his website: www.missionarycare.com, and if you haven't taken some time to browse there, you need to! There is some tremendous stuff there!

Mostly quiet development lately

I've taken a bit of a break from adding a lot of new features into the DM, but have been adding some nice small enhancements and "slipping" them into the current version 5.31.

The new goodies are available to those who do the "live update." This live update feature is making it really easy for me to put new things in the program and get them released as quickly and easily as possible.

And, according to the website stats, folks are indeed checking the the live updates regularly.

The biggest things I've been adding is support for contribution processing for several new organizations. Most of these have been really easy to add!

Plus, I've added a few enhancements to the error handling routine.

On the programming front, I've been busy at work on the new personalized bulk e-mailing routines. I'll probably have beta of this ready for testing in the next week or so.

This has real possibilities to be a nice feature. There are a lot of challenges to overcome, of course, but I think they are doable. The biggest challenge is to make it flexible enough to meet a lot of people's needs and wants while keeping it simple enough that it will actually be usable!

I'm working on the interface and workflow and logic, and Doug Thomson has some mailing routines he has been working on that will be a huge help.

I'll write more about that in a day or so.