Getting started steps

twisted1919 — Mon, 30 May 2016 13:27:23 +0000

To quickly get started with MailBul, you’ll want to first understand the application structure then follow these steps:

As an admin:

Make sure your cron jobs are properly set.
Add your delivery servers.
Add your bounce servers.
Add your feedback loop servers.
Verify your delivery settings.
Check out ways to extend the application.
Learn what available logs you have at hand for troubleshooting potential issues.

As a customer:

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Understanding the application structure

twisted1919 — Mon, 30 May 2016 13:05:34 +0000

In order to make things easier to manage, MailBul is divided into several small sub-apps, like the backend, customer, api, console and frontend app.

The backend app is used for administrative tasks and here only the system users have access.

The customer app is used to create manage emails lists, subscribers and campaigns.

The console app is the heavy worker, it contains all the cron jobs commands that are executed on various intervals to run maintenance, send campaigns, process bounces and so on.

The frontend app is used for public facing actions, like showing the subscription forms.

The api app is used to allow custom integrations from various other apps with your own app, like customers sending subscribers from external systems to their lists. You can disable it any any time.

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Cron jobs setup

twisted1919 — Mon, 30 May 2016 13:15:36 +0000

Maybe the most important thing that you have to do after you install the application is to make sure all the cron jobs are set properly. This is very important since without the cron jobs, the application will not be able to send any email at all, or to do maintenance cleanup and a lot other tasks.

You can find a list with all the cron jobs that you have to add by going in Backend > Miscellaneous > Cron Jobs List.

If you are not sure what cron jobs are, we have you covered, read more about them here.

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Delivery servers

twisted1919 — Mon, 30 May 2016 13:18:01 +0000

Delivery servers are needed in order to send out all the emails from the application.

Even if it’s about sending a confirmation email, an email campaign, a test email, you need a delivery server to actually make the delivery.

MailBul comes with support for any SMTP server out there, PHP’s built-in mail function and sendmail.

Also it integrates with services like Sparkpost, MailGun, Amazon SES, SendGrid, ElasticEmail, NewsMan and much more in order to make sure you are not limited into using just a single service but you have a wide array of options.
You can use either of them, or all of them together.
MailBul gives you total flexibility for this.

Video:

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Bounce servers

twisted1919 — Mon, 30 May 2016 13:18:41 +0000

You like it or not, when you start sending emails, not all your addresses will be valid and when sending emails to invalid email addresses, these emails will return to you in order to notify you that the given email address is not valid anymore.

In order for MailBul to be able to catch these emails and take proper actions against them, you need to use a feature called bounce servers.

Bounce servers are actually regular email boxes that are used by MailBul in order to catch the returning emails and take proper actions. After creating a bounce server, make sure you associate it with a delivery server, otherwise bounce processing will not work.

Please note that delivery servers of type web api do not need bounce servers.

The bounces are processed automatically through webhooks.

Video:

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Feedback loop servers

twisted1919 — Mon, 30 May 2016 13:20:10 +0000

Every time when the Spam button is pressed by one of your subscribers, the email provider the subscriber belongs to, will send a notification related to that event. In order to receive such notifications, you should subscribe for such notifications at the email provider.
Here you can find a list with email providers and their feedback loop subscribe process.

However, most email providers will also send the notifications at one of these 3 addresses: abuse@domain.com, postmaster@domain.com and fbl@domain.com.
In order for MailBul to process these notifications, you need to add feedback loop servers for each email address, either for the one you subscribed at the email provider, or for the 3 listed above.

Please note that when sending only via delivery servers of type web api you don’t need to setup feedback loop servers since these are automatically processed via webhooks.

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Create your first email list

twisted1919 — Mon, 30 May 2016 13:55:59 +0000

In order to start sending email campaign, you should start by creating your first email list. Your email list identifies you as a sender, it contains your information and allows you to take various decisions related to your subscribers.
Each list is totally separate, which means you can customise each list as you wish, including subscribers, custom forms/pages and custom fields.

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Delivery settings

twisted1919 — Mon, 30 May 2016 13:21:53 +0000

By default, MailBul uses delivery settings that will be fine for most of people. However, if you need, you can properly adjust them in order to get a higher delivery speed.

Please be aware that wrong delivery settings can cause a lot of issues, including the fact that some ISP’s will blacklist your sending ip addresses if you are sending too fast.

You can read more about how delivery settings work here.

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Add subscribers to your email list

twisted1919 — Mon, 30 May 2016 13:56:53 +0000

Once your email list is created, next step is to start importing your subscribers into the list. In order to do so, just click on your list title from lists area,
then click on the Tools box, followed by the Import box.
You will be allowed to import from a csv file, a text file or from another database as described here.

Video:

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Send a campaign

twisted1919 — Mon, 30 May 2016 13:57:43 +0000

Finally, after your list is created and you have added your subscribers into it,
it’s time to create your first campaign.
You will be able to select the list you want to use for sending and optionally, a segment from the list.
You can add a new template just for the campaign itself or use an existing one.
Make sure you test all campaigns before actually sending them, this is crucial.

If you want to test your campaign spam score, feel free to use this tool.
Once you see everything looks good, send your campaign and enjoy very detailed, real time statistics.

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