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Month: September 2017

When scheduling multi-day mail merge campaigns, you can now choose to skip the weekends. While the Skip Weekends checkbox under the Scheduling section may look simple, its underlying functionality is actually quite complex. What is a weekend? A weekend is 12:00 AM Saturday to 11:59 PM Sunday, based on your computer’s local time.

Skip Weekends
By checking “Skip Weekends”, no emails will be sent on a weekend. The auto follow-up Stages will count based on business days (Mon-Fri) rather than all days.

The “Skip Weekends” setting applies under the following scenarios:

  • You’re sending an email campaign where you use the “spread out” feature to send only a certain number of emails/day. With “Skip Weekends” on, the campaign would only send Monday through Friday.
  • You have a long-running campaign, sending 24 hours/day. As soon as it becomes Saturday, by your chosen time zone, the campaign will pause and resume sending on Monday morning at 8:00 AM by your chosen time zone. Your “chosen” time zone is your computer’s local time zone unless you manually changed the time zone offset in the Scheduling Date/Time field.
  • You’re sending an email campaign that recurs daily or hourly, based on new rows found in your Google Sheet. With “Skip Weekends” on, the campaign wouldn’t check for new spreadsheet rows during the weekend.
  • You’re sending a reminder email campaign every month on the 1st of the month. With “Skip Weekends” on, if the 1st of a month falls on a weekend, the email will be sent the following Monday instead.
  • You’ve configured auto follow-up emails and set your various Stage 1, Stage 2, and other Stage’s Days. With “Skip Weekends” on, it is assumed that the number of Days set for the various Stages are “business” days. Meaning, if you launch a campaign on Wednesday, and set Stage1=3 Days, then that means 3 “business” days, so Stage 1 will send on Monday.
  • If your campaign unexpectedly exceeds your Gmail account limits and starts generating Gmail’s “You have reached a sending limit” bounces, GMass detects that and pauses your campaign. Normally your campaign is paused for four hours. With “Skip Weekends” on, if four hours later is a weekend, then the campaign is pushed back to Monday morning at 8am, your local time.
  • You send an email campaign right now, and it happens to be the weekend. With “Skip Weekends” on, your mail merge would send at the same time on the following Monday instead of right now.

Practically speaking…

Practically speaking, why would you want to use the “Skip Weekends” setting? Generally, it’s because you want your recipients to get your email when they’re most likely to be working, and then they’d expect you to be working. Specifically, with each scenario described above:

  • If you’ve intentionally spread out your campaign to send only a certain number of emails/day, you may wish to skip the weekends so that your recipients get their emails only when they’re likely to be working.
  • If you’re using auto follow-up emails, it’s more likely your recipients will believe the follow-up is a manually typed out email just to them if it’s on a weekday rather than on the weekend.
  • If you’re setting up a daily recurring mail merge campaign tied to a spreadsheet, you may want to be able to add rows to your spreadsheet on Saturday and Sunday but not have those emails send until the following Monday.

Timing Examples

Here is how the timing works when Skip Weekends is checked:

  • If you send a campaign during the course of a weekend, it will instead send on the following Monday at the same time. For example, let’s say it’s Saturday at 3pm your local time. You send a campaign “now” but with “Skip Weekends” checked. It would not send until Monday at 3pm your local time.
  • With auto follow-ups, the Days you set for the various Stages are counted as business days, meaning Monday through Friday only. If you start a campaign on Wednesday at 11am, and set your Stage 1 auto follow-up to go in 4 Days, the Stage 1 follow-up would send on Tuesday at 11am, since Tuesday is four “business” days after Wednesday.
  • With automated recurring campaigns, if the campaign is set to repeat daily to new rows found in a Google Sheet, then the campaign sends Monday to Friday at the same time, to new email addresses found in the spreadsheet. If the campaign is set to repeat hourly, then the campaign would check for new spreadsheet rows and send during the 11pm hour on Friday night, and then resume checking the spreadsheet and sending on Monday right after midnight strikes.
  • GMass pauses your campaign when it detects that it’s bouncing because you’ve exceeded your sending limits. If a batch of emails is sending at Friday at 10pm at night, and GMass detects “over limits” bounces, then the campaign would resume sending at Monday at 8am. We’ve chosen Monday at 8am specifically for these scenarios, rather than the stroke of midnight on Monday.

Other things to know

  1. Remember, a weekend is defined by your computer’s local time, not GMT time. Some reports and notifications in GMass are shown in GMT time, but weekends are defined by your local time.
  2. The “Skip Weekends” setting sticks, meaning if you set it for one campaign, the box will be automatically checked the next time you launch a Compose window.
  3. “Skip weekends” can sometimes cause confusion with the timing of auto follow-ups, especially in recurring campaigns. You can always check when follow-ups are scheduled for a campaign and who will receive them with the calendar view.
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If you’ve used our Google Sheets integration to send your mail merge campaigns, you may have noticed how UGLY our spreadsheet dropdown used to be. If you had lots of spreadsheets, finding the right one was a pain.

No longer! Now, the spreadsheet dropdown is BEAUTIFUL, and you can easily search for the right spreadsheet just by typing a few characters that match any part of the name.

Google Sheets Dropdown
Just type a few characters, and your matching spreadsheets will appear.

​In fact, we’ve updated all of the major dropdown menus in GMass to this new style, including the Past Campaigns and the Load Content dropdowns.

New dropdown
The new awesome dropdown for Past Campaigns.

And here’s the improved Load Content dropdown:

Content Dropdown
The awesome searchable dropdown menu to load a campaign’s content

To get the update, your Chrome browser has to update the GMass extension to the latest version 4.0.1, which will happen in the next 48 hours automatically. Don’t want to wait? You can also manually update the extension immediately by:

1. Going to chrome://extensions and clicking the Update extensions now button at the top.
2. Then reloading Gmail (or Google Inbox) in the browser.

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This article is intended for software developers or those interested in the code behind GMass.

GMass is written mostly in C# and JavaScript, and the C# backend makes heavy use of a popular email parsing component called MimeKit. In face, MimeKit, has become so popular that Microsoft is now recommending that developers use it as the standard instead of Microsoft’s own SmtpClient library.

Over the weekend, we updated some of the software components that GMass is built on in preparation for a big feature launch, and in doing so, we updated MimeKit from version 1.12 to the latest release 1.18. That upgrade unfortunately broke some of our email address validation code, and many users saw a “token offset” error as a result.

Here’s what happened. Previously, in version 1.12, the following scenarios would pass without throwing an exception:

MimeKit Sample 1
MimeKit Code Sample: These scenarios pass, and no exception is thrown.

After updating to version 1.18, the top two of the three scenarios do throw an exception:

MimeKit Sample 2
MimeKit Code Sample: After updating to version 1.18, these throw a parsing exception.

The impact on GMass is such that if you’re connecting to a Google Sheets spreadsheet, and your column containing email addresses has a bad data value that is an invalid email address, such as “[email protected];[email protected]”, whereas before our code would handle this appropriately and eventually filter the bad entry out, now all of a sudden, our code was throwing an exception.

Making matters more complex was that the MimeKit TryParse didn’t always catch a string that could not be converted into a MimeKit.MailboxAddress object. For example:

MimeKit Sample 3
MimeKit Code Sample: TryParse returns true, but the string still can’t be converted to a MailboxAddress object.

In the above samples, TryParse returns false for “[email protected];[email protected]” but returns true for “test<[email protected]>”. It returns true for the latter because it assumes that the part outside the angle brackets is the Name, and so Name=test and [email protected]. Our code though attempts to create a MailboxAddress object from the whole string, and in this case, the parse into Name and Address doesn’t happen, as the constructor assumes that the entire string represents just the Address portion of the object.

We did check the Release Notes for MimeKit before deploying the update, but there was nothing indicating the change in email parsing rules. Still however, we are eternally grateful to Jeffrey Stedfast for building and maintaining the MimeKit library for the .NET framework. Without it, my job as a software developer parsing and assembling email messages would be far more difficult.

 

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Gmail Error: You have reached a limit for sending mail. your message was not sent.

If you’re sending mail merge emails from your Gmail account, you’re likely aware of the basic limits that Gmail and G Suite set for your accounts. Generally, those limits are 500 emails/day for Gmail accounts and 2,000 emails/day for G Suite accounts. As is often the case though, users find that Gmail limits them below the stated values of 500 and 2,000 per day. For example, a new Gmail account can often only send 10-20 emails in its first 24-hour period. Similarly, a new G Suite account, especially when the domain is a new customer of G Suite, also has limits more restrictive than 2,000 emails/day.

Troubleshooting:

If you find that your sending volume is under the stated limits but are still getting the dreaded “You have reached a limit” bounce in Gmail, here are some strategies to help.

G Suite User? Contact G Suite Support

I’ve experienced cases where my own G Suite account was limited to 750 or 1,000 emails per 24 hours rather than 2,000. I contacted support, and they admitted that my account had been mistakenly limited and eventually resolved the issue and allowed me greater sending power. Here’s my correspondence with support:

G Suite Support
Correspondence with G Suite support about Gmail limits

Use the “throttle” setting to add a few seconds between emails

On Google’s official page describing Gmail sending limits, the 500 and 2,000 daily limits are mentioned. Anecdotally though, we’ve found that sending too many emails within too short a time span can also cause a limit to kick in. One support agent communicated that too many emails sent within a 10-minute period will set off red flags. Use the GMass throttle setting to add a few seconds in between emails. This will slow down the delivery of your messages, but help avoid any per-minute or per-hour limitations.

G Suite User? Perform an administrative reset

As a G Suite user, you can have your Admin reset your account’s quota if you are getting “You have reached your limit” bounces. However, this can only be done 5x/year.

G Suite Reset
Reset your Gmail quota if you are a G Suite user

Circumvent Gmail’s servers altogether

You can now use your Gmail account to send mail merge campaigns through any SMTP server, bypassing Gmail’s servers and sending limits. This will allow you to use GMass to send mail merge campaigns through your Gmail account, just like normal, but your emails will be routed through a third-party SMTP service like Sendgrid, Mailgun, or JangoSMTP.

How can you programmatically detect these bounces?

If you’re a software developer building your own mail merge system for Gmail, you may want to know how to write code to detect these “You have reached a limit” bounces. It used to be easy, because Gmail used to send these notifications from a special address, [email protected].

In the summer of 2019, however, Google changed the address to the standard bounce notification address of [email protected], which then made it more difficult to detect “reached a limit” bounces from other types of bounces, like those indicating a bad recipient email address. There is however, one distinguishing factor that separates “reached a limit” bounces from all other kinds of bounces. The “reached a limit” bounce will have a Subject line of “Re: ” plus the original email’s Subject line. All other bounces from the “mailer-daemon” address will have the subject of “Delivery Status Notification (Failure)” or “Delivery Status Notification (Delay)”. For example, if the email you sent had the Subject “Company Newsletter”, and you receive an over-limit bounce, it will have the Subject of “Re: Company Newsletter”.

It’s also worth noting that the message will be in the same language as you’ve set your Gmail settings.

The full English message is:

You have reached a limit for sending mail. Your message was not sent.

The German message is:

Sie haben die Begrenzung zum Senden von E-Mails erreicht. Ihre Nachricht konnte daher nicht gesendet werden.

The Norwegian message is:

Du har nådd grensen for sending av e-post. Meldingen din er ikke sendt.

The Spanish message is:

Has llegado al límite de mensajes que puedes enviar. Tu mensaje no se ha enviado.

Further Reading

If you do find that you’re getting bounces because you’re over your Gmail limit, GMass will re-try sending those emails for you later automatically, but you can also manually re-send to the addresses that bounced.

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GMass runs on a farm of Windows servers, and as the chief systems administrator, one of the constant worries in the back of my mind is whether any of the disks on any of the servers is near capacity. Naturally, I decided to Google “Windows disk space monitor”.

Given the usefulness of such a tool for any Windows server administrator like myself, I was expecting to be overwhelmed with viable options. Not only was I not overwhelmed, but the first two disk space monitors I downloaded sucked — to the point that I can’t even believe they are on the first page of Google. It goes to show that Google’s search results don’t always yield the best tools, just the most popular. Case in point, GMass is probably the world’s best Gmail mail merge tool, but a search for “Gmail mail merge” and GMass is shown near the bottom of page 1 and sometimes at the top of page 2. Yes, competition for that term is stiff indeed.

But I digress. Googling for “Windows disk space monitor” produces the following tools, and in this order:

  1. The Microsoft Performance Logs and Alerts technique
  2. A tool called Netwrix Disk Space Monitor from Netwrix
  3. A full server monitoring tool called PRGT from a company called Paessler
  4. A tool called Disk Monitor Lite from ManageEngine
  5. A tool called Meerkat, written by a sole developer and not backed by a real company
  6. A tool called Advanced Disk Space Monitor from Abaiko Software

Before I explain why 4 out of these 5 suck, let me first explain exactly what I wanted in the right disk space monitoring software:

  1. It should run as a service, so that if the server re-boots itself in the middle of the night, my disk space is still being monitored.
  2. It should have the ability to email me at defined thresholds, either in actual amount of space left or percentage of space left.

That’s all — just two simple requirements that most software calling itself “disk space monitoring” software failed to meet. Let’s break it down.

Windows Performance Logs and Alerts

The options to be alerted include: logging an entry in the Application Event Log, sending a network message to another server, initiating a performance data log, or running an EXE. That’s right — no email option, no text message option. How does Microsoft not understand the importance of email? They bought Hotmail in the late 90s, created Microsoft Exchange as their own email server platform, and now compete head-to-head against Gmail with Outlook.com. Yet the notion that a sysadmin would want to get an email to alert them of impending server doom is somehow lost upon them.

Why it sucks: No option to be emailed.

Netwrix Disk Space Monitor

A simple, and supposedly free tool, that at first glance, I was convinced would solve my problem and my search would be over. Ehhh, not quite. Here’s a screenshot of the email settings. Let’s see if you can figure out what’s missing:

On the surface, it looks like it has everything you need to have an email sent to yourself when there’s a disk space issue. SMTP server, recipient address, From address. But wait…there’s no place to input SMTP server login information. Pretty much every SMTP server in the universe requires authentication by username and password (a few still let you authenticate by IP address), but given that there’s a thing called “spam” nowadays, Netwrix’s tool would only work circa 1999, when most SMTP servers were still open relays.

Why it sucks: No option to authenticate into the SMTP server.

Disk Monitor Lite

Total misnomer. Does some cool stuff and generates a cool report, but it doesn’t actually do any monitoring. That’s right — while it can generate on-demand reports, if you look at its feature list, nowhere will you find the ability to be alerted upon low disk space.

Why it sucks: No actual monitoring.

Paessler PRTG Network Monitor

I’m betting that this tool would have done exactly what I wanted, but figuring out how to get it to do it was a hurdle I was unwilling to cross. This tool does a lot. And as such, it’s UI is complex. All I cared about was knowing when my disks were about to fill up, and this tool does 1,000 things more. Along with installing three different applications (the Network Monitor, the Administration Tool, and the Enterprise Console) to your Windows Start menu, there are at least two different user interfaces to manage.

Here’s what I saw when I first installed and launched the tool:

And here is the Enterprise Console.

Do you see any prompts that ask at what disk space threshold I want to be alerted? Neither do I. Next.

Why it sucks: It probably doesn’t, but it’s complicated as hell.

Meerkat

At the bottom of page 1 of the Google search results was a little tool called Meerkat. I liked that it was called “meerkat”, and I liked that it was created and explained by a sole developer. And obviously, I liked that it was free. Let’s go right to a screenshot:

Meerkat Disk Space Monitor
Meerkat Disk Space Monitor “Disks” settings

Nice. It shows me my disks, let me check the ones to monitor, and set the free space threshold to be alerted.

Meerkat Disk Space Monitor
Meerkat Disk Space Monitor “Options”

And look at that…right below the space where I set my SMTP server, I set my SMTP server username and password. Beautiful. I think I have a winner, until I go to my second server to install it. The install fails because I have .NET 4.7 installed (the latest), and it ONLY works with 3.5:

Meerkat sucks
Meerkat won’t install unless you have exactly .NET 3.5 installed.

Why it sucks: It requires a very specific .NET version, 3.5, to run. If you have anything greater, like version 4.7, which is the latest right now, it won’t install.

Advanced Disk Space Monitor (the WINNER)

You have to go to page 2 of the search results to find the one tool that doesn’t suck. It doesn’t suck because it lets you define your thresholds for each disk individually. It doesn’t suck because it will email you an alert when you’re running out of space.

Advanced Disk Space Monitor Screenshot
The general disk space settings for Advanced Disk Space Monitor

It doesn’t suck because it lets you configure a username and password for the SMTP server through which the email is sent. And finally, it doesn’t suck, because it will actually run on a Windows server with the latest .NET framework installed. Beautiful. We have a winner. It will, however, cost you $20 per license. But after all the effort I’ve put in so far, $100 for five servers is nothing.

Advanced Disk Space Monitor Screenshot
The email settings for Advanced Disk Space Monitor

Why it sucks: It doesn’t! It’s awesome.

One more option

After I found my winner, I stopped my search, but if you continue scanning through page 1 and 2 of the search results, you’ll find one more tool called Overseer. I did not sample this tool for my research, but if for some reason Advanced Disk Space Monitor doesn’t float your boat, check this one out, and perhaps comment on it below. It has a long hyphenated domain name, which looks unprofessional to me, but I forgive them because finding the right domain to launch a software product is damn near impossible these days.

TL;DR

Most Windows disk space monitors suck. The one that doesn’t, Advanced Disk Space Monitor, will not be found on page 1 of a Google search of “Windows disk space monitor.”

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