Announcements

I am proud to announced that ListMessenger Pro is expanding it’s horizons. A new type of integrated ListMessenger will be available for purchase later this month with complete integration with Mambo CMS [http://www.mamboserver.com]. Phil Taylor, a full time developer for Mambo Server and myself will be working together to bring you ListMessenger Pro for Mambo.

Mambo Open Source is a commercial quality, GPL’d Content Management System (CMS) which makes building and managing a website simple. Mambo is a very highly respected application with a huge market share in the CMS industry. Enterprise applications such as Plesk have chosen Mambo as their integrated CMS tool and we couldn’t be happier to have a new completely integrated version of ListMessenger to share with this exciting and vast community of users.

More details will be available soon on the ListMessenger Pro for Mambo website http://mambo.listmessenger.com.

A New Face for ListMessenger – A New Forum for Users

After over a year and a half calling http://scripts.digitalorphans.org/listmessenger home, the new ListMessenger website has finally been launched at http://www.listmessenger.com and will continue to expand over the next few months. Content to be added includes manuals and documentation, search functionality, reseller and community information as well as the much anticipated ListMessenger Light 1.0. I feel that the new website is the professional face to a professional product and with enhancements will do us well for the exciting year ahead.

I also took this opportunity to upgrade the forum from InvisionBoard 1.1.2 to InvisionBoard 1.3 and give it a similar look and feel as listmessenger.com.

In either case, there are bound to be a few hiccups somewhere that we haven’t caught during debugging and testing, so if you find something that you feel doesn’t work properly or has errors please send a bug report to: bugreport@listmessenger.com and please include the exact URL, your operating system, web-browser and version as well as any special applications you may have had running at the time the error occurred.

I am pleased to announce that after nearly one and a half years in development, ListMessenger Pro 1.0 will be available for purchase ($49.95CAD || ~$35.73USD) on Monday, September 29th, 2003. This will be the first commercial version of the application available and will contain many feature enhancements and bug fixes over current private and public development versions.

Prior to September 29th there will be a final development phase release, given to selected ListMessenger users who have made contributions to the project during it’s first development cycle. These users will be contacted by myself when I am ready to release, so please do not e-mail me asking to be included in the pre-release testing phase.

Here is a sneak peak of some of ListMessenger newest features, please feel free to discuss any of these on this forum; however, be advised that ListMessenger is currently in a feature freeze and nothing else will be added until after ListMessenger Pro 1.0 is released.

ListMessenger Program:
– Text-Message spell-checking (requires PHP to be compiled –with-pspell)
– HTML-Message Rich Text Editor with image uploading
– Simple user subscribe/unsubscribe history browser
– Administrators “Add Members” contains optional “opt-in” request
– Quick “Save” feature when composing a message
– Queue pruning support for selected message types
– Quickly copy a message from message options window
– View composed message directly from message options window
– Import addresses into ListMessenger (Microsoft Excel / CSV)
– Upgraded PHPMailer class
– Preview HTML Templates
– Advanced licence management
– Searchable/Dumpable subscribe/unsubscribe list
– Opt-out message added to bottom of _all_ text messages
– Opt-out variable added to HTML Template

End-User Tools:
– End-User tools migrated to it’s own “public” directory
– End-User tools preferences are now in the Control Panel
– Optional “opt-in” message from End-User tools integrated
– Public archive of previous messages
– Banned e-mail address and banned domains list
– End-User Tools now use customizable language files

There may be more features that I just haven’t mentioned as well.

Please be advised that while I will do everything I can to have ListMessenger Light 1.0 ready by September 29th, it is currently 3rd on my priority list. 1) Being getting ListMessenger Pro completed 2) Being complete the new ListMessenger website / store 3) Being to complete ListMessenger Light. Please do not worry, I will try to not let this be a habit as I plan on always releasing the Pro & Light versions at the same time and there _will_ always be a Light version for users to use at no cost.

Despite my better judgement, ListMessenger Pro 1.0 will include the ability to import and export both names and e-mail addresses in CSV and Microsoft Excel formats. This feature will be located in the Control Panel under Import/Exporting.

Important: ListMessenger Light (free version) will not contain this feature at all, nor will I provide support, scripts or instructions as to how to import or export names or e-mail addresses from or to the database.

Important: This is not a selling point to try to get people to purchase the Pro version for $49.95CAD. The reason that I am including this feature is because if an admin decides that they wish to switch from another mailing list manager to ListMessenger, as of right now, they have no way of doing this. This alone would be a huge set back for the program and a huge deturant for new ListMessenger users.

This was an extremely hard decision for me to make, as I fear now more than ever that this feature will make ListMessenger at least some what more appealing to SPAMers; however, I do have and will continue to develop effective features into ListMessenger that attempt this from happening. Abuse of this feature will not be tolerated, there will be no warnings and any one who is caught abusing this will have a big surprise when they try to log into their ListMessenger installation and their key is no longer valid.

Despite my better judgment, ListMessenger Pro 1.0 will have the option of subscription confirmation on sign-up to accompany the subscription confirmation option upon un-subscribing. The option will be located in the End-User Prefereces within the control panel.

Important: ListMessenger Light (free version) will not contain this feature at all, nor will I provide support, scripts or instructions as to how to remove the subscription confirmation.

Important: This is not a selling point to try to get people to purchase the Pro version for $49.95CAD. The reason that I am including it as an option in the Pro version is because in many cases people have valid reasons for not wanting the confirmation and they have paid money to use the program and receive support. Some valid reasons in my opinion that I have heard are:
1) I use ListMessenger inside of another sign-up script and include it as an opt-in checkbox.
2) I use ListMessenger combined with my on-line store and include it as an opt-in checkbox.
3) I use ListMessenger on my companies Intranet and employees shouldn’t have to confirm.
4) etc etc.

So either way, I thought that I would make this announcement so I don’t have to answer any more posts, suggestions or feature requests regarding this issue.

Also note, that abuse of this feature will not be tolerated, there will be no warnings and any one who is caught abusing this will have a big surprise when they try to log into their ListMessenger installation and their key is no longer valid.