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Existing Customers Feedback - How is Gossamer Mail

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Existing Customers Feedback - How is Gossamer Mail
Hello,

I am looking into buying Gossamer Mail but wanted to get some feedback from existing customers of the Gossamer Mail product.

How do you all like it?
What are it's pros and cons?

Thanks. :)

Jim Murray
PaintballCity.com
http://www.paintballcity.com
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Re: Existing Customers Feedback - How is Gossamer In reply to
I have been using Gossamer Mail in production use now for a week and it is working great. I had Gossamer make customizations which utilize auth_mysql for authenticating users. I use one master database for authenticating my entire site including discussion forums.

In addition I had a feature added that requires users to respond to a code sent to their permanent email account before activation. A word of warning though this option ends in lots of support questions from confused users. In the beginning I found I had 10% requiring assistance, now it is closer to 5% after some instructional verbage modification.

Support from Gossamer-threads has been fantastic.

The only must have feature that missing is the automatic bouncing of messages sent to users who do not exist. This is really needed badly as I now have 1000 users registered under the catch all system and it is easy for mail to get lost. As a system administrator what happens is users do not get their mail from friends because they mispelled something. Because the message never got kicked back when user finds out the message disappeared they blame it on the crappy email system when it was really a misspelled username on the senders part. Since they never get a return mail message back they never know it did not make it do its destination.

Todd

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Re: Existing Customers Feedback - How is Gossamer In reply to
This is something I've been seeking out, and asking about in forums all over the net. Not just for this program, but for a general mailing list maintainer.

Most people just say "It can't be done".

I say, it _has_ to be able to be done, because we've got some defined parameters.

We have the bounced messages ending up in a bounced-mail file.

All that has to be developed is a script to read that file, and re-deliver the mail to the ORIGINATING address, rather than the system-postmaster.

On the qmail list there have been similar questions, and the answers have been unsatisfactory or in the general "well, it requires more knowledge of qmail than I have".

I don't know why it should be so hard.... after all PERL _is_ a text processing and extraction language!

It should be able to create a script that reads the bounced mail file, and finds the messages, then seeks out the transcript/attached area and searches for the "From:" from field.

The message is then re-delivered to that address.

If that bounces, for whatever reason (in this case, it would have to be a corrupt file, or spam) then the "From: field is from the qmailr or GossMail re-mailer, so it won't bounce a second time. It's just declared "dead" by the remailer.

Unless I'm missing something truely divine, this is all I'm doing by hand, and it takes an aswesome amount of time.... Something I'd like to automate. And without going into any discussions about monkeys, if I can do it by hand, following a simple formula, so could a script.


PUGDOGŪ
PUGDOGŪ Enterprises, Inc.
FAQ: http://postcards.com/FAQ


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Re: Existing Customers Feedback - How is Gossamer In reply to
It's not quite that easy. If you start auto replying, you can easily get into a mail loop. For instance, you get a message to an invalid user. The system sends off a bounced reply. The message then hits a vacation program which sends a reply back from the user, and you have a loop.

People could be sneaky and set up a script that handles all replies. As soon as Gossamer Mail sends it's bounce message, the script fires two messages back at Gossamer Mail with headers crafted in such a way to be difficult to detect. This will quickly shut down your server. The reason places like Yahoo can do it is they do it on the mail server level and have access to more information then Gossamer Mail does from just the mail headers.

There are a lot of issues to take into account to do it properly. This isn't to say we aren't going to try to do it though, as if done right it can add a lot of features (email forwarding, etc). Just takes a lot of thought and reasearch.

Cheers,

Alex

--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: Existing Customers Feedback - How is Gossamer In reply to
Well..... I would dare say that a large (if not most) of the users of a program like this would have access to the mail server. A dedicated server often runs the mail program (it has on each of the servers I've run for the past 6-7 years).

If it can be done at the qmail level, that would be an option -- even if it's the only one that is truly viable. There is a 'double bounce' setting of some sort,and other things that can be looked at.

Also, what information does the mailer have that the script wouldn't, when parsing the headers?

If a "human" can sit and see the headers, and pick out the fields, a program can do it much better.

For instance...

The mail bounces once. We know it does, because it's in the bounced mail folder.

Now, we know it most likely bounced because one of the delivery addresses (usually the to:) was bad.

If the to: and from: are different, an attempt to deliver the message to the from: address and let them know the mail bounced would be good.

Additionally, if this was a "mailing list" the to: field needs to be removed from the mailing list, and put on a 'suspect' list, so it's not mailed to again.

Perhaps keeping a list of recent bounces, so that you don't enter a ping pong game would make sense, but if the headers can be properly parsed that would just be a security thing from a malicious hacker who would find a way to do it anyway. Limit the number of "bounced replies" to any server or address to a certain number per unit time, depending on how busy your mailer is. Bounces from a mailing list are much more time-compressed than routine member mailings, the program should "wait" before acting on any mailing list bounces.

There just _has_ to be a way to keep a pretty up to date list of addresses, and to handle bounces so that senders are properly notified.

If it can be done manually, it can be done with PERL <G>

PUGDOGŪ
PUGDOGŪ Enterprises, Inc.
FAQ: http://postcards.com/FAQ


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Re: Existing Customers Feedback - How is Gossamer In reply to
In Reply To:
Also, what information does the mailer have that the script wouldn't, when parsing the headers?
The mail server has the "mail envelope" information. Gossamer Mail never sees that information, as it is removed once the mail server delivers the mail. Think of traditional snail mail, Gossamer Mail only sees the contents of what's inside a letter, whereas the postman can see the full address on the letter.

This is how BCC works, if you BCC someone, depending on your mail server, you may not see any reference to your email address in the headers, yet you still got the email. This works because the information was in the envelope.

It's not impossible, but it is definately not straight forward. We are looking at implementing this in some fashion for the next version.

Cheers,

Alex

--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: Existing Customers Feedback - How is Gossamer Mail In reply to
Thought I'd put my two cents in. I've got Gossamer Mail, and the program seems to be great. Although, I found the current version is missing a few, what I consider necessities, if you're opening it up for public use. The new version which they're working on at the moment I believe will address these and make it fantastic! I've had the software for about 4 or 5 months, but have decided to basically stick it in the bin till the new release comes out - so as you can imagine I'm hanging out for it to be released.

What I found missing was...

1. An easy way for the admin to add 'reserved' mail user names - I've got quite a large list I want to reserve.
2. An automated password reminder mod for the users - without it you could be receiving a lot of time consuming emails.
3. A non-frame version of the templates (I'm not really too worried about this one).
4. A way to email users, if it could be similar to the way LinksSQL works, ie. Email users based on a menu selection from their registration information or other collected information.
5. An easy way to select or add/remove new fields in the user registration form. If you've seen the AdvertPRO affilliate plugin manager works you'll know what I mean. You can basically just click on/off a selection of checkboxes for the fields you want displayed on the signup form.

Thats all I can think of now. I'm expecting the next version will be great and recommend it.

Cheers,

Regan.

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Re: Existing Customers Feedback - How is Gossamer Mail In reply to
This all sounds great...I'm probably going to buy it now...or should I wait till the next version comes out...How long will it be till the next version comes out?

Thanks. :)

Jim Murray
PaintballCity.com
http://www.paintballcity.com
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Re: Existing Customers Feedback - How is Gossamer In reply to
Alex, here's an idea for the auto-reply feature. In all auto-replies the "to", "from", and "reply to" fields can be modified so user "john@email.com" would be changed to "john@email-is-on-vacation.com". This way any/all replies will be bounced to some non-existent domain and thus relieving email.com's servers of junk.

To be a responsible admin, one can also set up a free namezero account with this email-is-on-vacation.com and let all replies to auto-replies bounce there.


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Re: Existing Customers Feedback - How is Gossamer Mail In reply to
I'm not sure when it will be available - any word from the guys at GT?

Also not sure if the new version will be more expensive than the current one, but I 'think' if you have the current version when it is released you get a free upgrade - I stand to be corrected on that. Probably worth contacting GT and asking.

Regards,

Regan.