Sophisticated Sending

Expert domain throttling: new plugin project

An exciting new crowd-sourcing project to enhance domain throttling is in its early stages. As one of its inbuilt deliverability features, phpList can throttle campaign sending by domain: if too many emails are sent to the same domain your IP address can be blacklisted; phpList can make sure emails sent to the same domain are sent in small batches to avoid getting blocked.

Community member lwc suggested we could achieve even better throttling if we could group together aliases that should be throttled as one, rather than separate domains. To use the domain throttling map, you need to install the domainthrottlemap plugin.

A screengrab of the code you can edit to add more aliases

The first domain aliases we have added to the project is Yahoo.co.uk and Yahoo.com, two common domains by the same provider. We are aiming to build a domain throttle map, a thorough list of domain aliases from many ISP’s, by crowd sourcing the aliases. Eventually this will make the plugin a powerful addition to phpList deliverability capacity in its out-of-the-box form. To contribute you can add the domains to the source code and make a github pull request.

Send test check

The Send Test input field on campaign workflow tabs will now check that your email is valid, and give you and error message if there us a problem with the address you entered. Thanks to community member gingerling for the suggestion.

Templating

[LOGO] Improvements

The logo placeholder now works with system messages and default system template as well as custom templates. Thanks to Duncanc and Sunriseal for their help with this issue.

Subscriber management

Foreign key matching fix

When importing subscriber info from third party applications, some users were having difficulties matching by foreign key (e.g. the ID used by the third party database, see Data that includes an ID in this manual chapter). The bug causing this has now been fixed. Thanks to pnotechnik for reporting.

phpList Minimum requirements are changing

Support for PHP version 5.3 and 5.4

This is the final version of phpList to support PHP version 5.3. All new releases from January 2016 will require PHP version 5.4 or above. During 2016 there are planned developments which will raise the minimum requirements to PHP 5.5. This latest release of phpList will continue to be compatible, however, without PHP 5.3, you will be unable to update to a newer version of phpList in future.

If you’re unsure of which version of PHP you’re using, try using this simple guide to check. If you are using shared hosting, you can ask your hosting provider to check the version for you, and upgrade if necessary.

From phpList 3.2.5 There will be a notice on the dashboard if the server is running an unsupported PHP version.

If you’ve had PHP 5.3 version compatibility issues with the last release of phpList, upgrading to this version will fix the issue.

Development

New plugin hook

There is a new plugin hook which is called at the moment a campaign has finished processing messages, after any pre-configured duplication of a campaign has taken place. Named processSendingCampaignFinished(), this is useful for automatically repeating campaigns, and has already been used by the dateplaceholder plugin. More details on GitHub.

PHP version support

The changes to the minimum required PHP version will allow developers to use modern testing and code quality libraries, such as StyleCI, with the phpList codebase, as well as permit newer features of the language to be used.