As we are coming to the end of Oempro4 development, we are also deciding the editions of Oempro4. Based on our 9 years of email marketing experience and feedbacks received from thousands of Octeth customers, we shaped Oempro4 editions in following plans:

• Individiual Edition
• Marketer / ESP Edition

Let me explain each edition briefly below:

Individual License
This edition targets individuals and small businesses who are willing to run their own email campaigns. This license will include a single user pack. Additional user packs can be added. The price of this edition will be highly affordable and include all professional features that an individual or a small business will need.

Marketer / ESP License
This edition targets professional email marketers and email service providers (ESP). This edition includes all functionality of Individual License plus more for running professional email campaigns, tracking results, managing spam complaints, etc. This license will include multiple user accounts. Additional user packs can be added. With this edition, a company can build and run a professional email marketing service just like Sendloop.com, ConstantContact.com or Aweber.com easily.

The feature sets of both editions will be announced later on. We will be including all features required to run a professional email campaign in both editions targeting all user segments.

Source Code
Source code of both Oempro4 editions will be 99% open source. We will be encrypting only the core module which will include the license validation algorithms. Therefore, Oempro4 will require Ioncube or Zend to run Oempro4 — usually, one or both of them available in today’s servers as a default application. We are sorry to add another requirement for Oempro4 but in order to save and protect our efforts and fight against piracy, we need to take such a precaution. This will not affect any customizations made to the source code because Oempro4 will be 99% open source. You can still customize the source code to integrate into your projects and systems.

We published 4 very-short surveys on our blog and looking forward to see your answers. Your answers will help us to make better decisions considering your answers.

Survey: What is your server type?
http://octeth.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3096

Survey: Which PHP version do you have installed?
http://octeth.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3095

Survey: Which control panel do you use?
http://octeth.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3094

Survey: What is your server operating system?
http://octeth.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3093

Looking forward to your answers. Thank you!

We post frequent updates to our Twitter accounts. So, if you are interested in getting notified more frequently about our services and products development phases, just stay in the loop with;

Octeth, Oempro3 and Oempro4 udpates:
twitter.com/octeth

Sendloop.com
twitter.com/sendloop

PreviewMyEmail.com
twitter.com/previewmyemail

Wridea.com
twitter.com/wridea

Our email design preview service PreviewMyEmail.com had a major update by our engineers and we found a great and faster way to preview your email designs on various email clients and show you screen shots within just a few minutes.

With the latest found technology, we are able to provide this service with a lower price.

Signing up to PreviewMyEmail.com is completely free. You pay when you preview your email. If you are previewing your emails frequently, we offer an unlimited plan as well.

PreviewMyEmail lets you to get screen shots of your emails on various email clients and services including;

• Yahoo! Mail
• Hotmail / Windows Live
• Gmail!
• AOL Webmail
• Outlook Express
• Outlook 2003
• Outlook 2007
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Lotus Notes 8

You can prefer Pay-As-You-Go plans or monthly subscription. For more information, please refer to PreviewMyEmail.com pricing page.

To give you an idea about what you can do with PreviewMyEmail.com, you can sign-up to monthly unlimited plan ($59 / month) and also activate API access ($25 / month). In this way, you can offer a brand new service to your customers at any price you want and display screen shots of their emails to them on your own application / website with the power of PreviewMyEmail.com backend. Your customers will never see a link of PreviewMyEmail.com. Nice idea, isn’t it?

Hi Everyone,

We are receiving ~10 emails per day asking about the status of Oempro4 development. So, I decided to post a quick status update about Oempro4. Development is going pretty good. With the advantage of being used in a real life situation at Sendloop.com, Oempro4 is going to be one of the best application for;

• running an email marketing service just like Sendloop.com, ConstantContact.com, etc.
• sending email newsletters and tracking results for customers
• sending your own email newsletters and running professional email marketing campaigns

With the release of Oempro4, there will be slight changes in plug-in family of Oempro. OemBilling plug-in is going to be discontinued because it is included as a built-in feature in Oempro4. Some other plug-ins will also be discontinued and provided as a built-in feature. We will post announcement about this topic in following weeks.

We are also going to change pricing of Oempro4. There will be two or three alternative pricing plans based on users defined on the system. The prices of support service, user packs and add-ons will be announced later as well. So, it’s the best time to purchase an Oempro license now and get a free upgrade once Oempro4 gets released.

In Oempro4, we are going to add some key features which do not exist in other solutions or cost you several $$$ to make it functional. We are going to start promoting them in following weeks as well.

Octeth is a leading email marketing solutions provider company since 1999 and we have a great experience in this field. We notice that most users try to run their email campaigns through shared hostings which cause them more problems than they guess. With the release of Oempro4, we will suggest our users to host Oempro4 on at least virtual private servers (VPS) or dedicated servers. We will also start providing consultancy service to make their servers ready for successful email marketing deliveries with the highest delivery rates. This service will cover mail server setup, web/MySQL server setup, etc.

Another requirement of Oempro4 is PHP5. Sorry for this but PHP5 is far away better and we need to get the benefits of PHP5 to make Oempro4 more flexible and stable.

Some features of Oempro4 are server (or environment) dependent. We will post a detailed announcement about Oempro4 requirements later,to give you an idea, sub-domain support (just like in Sendloop.com) will be available for Linux users. Windows users will not be able to get benefit of it.

We are coming to the end of the development phase of Oempro4. We have almost 120 beta testers waiting to test it in depth. We are doing our best to make Oempro4 available to the community but as always I say, it will not be released before it gets ready and approved through our beta testing phases.

Oempro4 is going to be the best solution for anyone who is interested in building and running a successful feature-rich email marketing service for their customers.

Thank you for your support.

There are updates on CAN-SPAM law that has happened past week. We thought that it will be good to break it down to plain English and point some important new regulations:

• Postal Address: From now on, a valid postal address must be included in the content of your email. PO boxes are accepted
• Businesses and individuals are now fully responsible for CAN-SPAM compliance for all commercial email they send
• If you don’t include your sender information (postal address, contact information, etc.) inside your email and if you send an email with advertises inside it, then your advertisers are fully responsible for CAN-SPAM compliance, even if your name is in the from header.
• If you are advertising on another email newsletter, be sure that the sender includes the sender information. Otherwise, you will be responsible for CAN SPAM compliance

Some other requirements are;

• Reply-to email address must be working in your emails
• Your email can not be false or misleading.
• Your email can not have a deceptive subject
• Must comply with the SEXUALLY EXPLICIT label
• Unsubscription link should be straight-forward without any “confirmation” steps
• Unsubscription link shouldn’t include any surveys

For more information about CAN SPAM law, please click here

Even if you are not located in United States, it’s good to comply with CAN SPAM law to make email communication channel a better system for everyone.

We just posted an article about how to set Octeth.SMTP.com SMTP server in Oempro v3.6.7 or later versions:

http://www.octeth.com/kb/oempro/send-engines-smtp-servers/how-to-set-octethsmtpcom-smtp-server-in-oempro/

We noticed that several shared hosting customers are having big problems about sending mass emails through their shared hosting mail servers. This kind of problems are quite normal for shared hosting environment because almost all hosting companies “limit” the sending in shared hosting to avoid any service outage.

We established a special business partnership with leading SMTP service provider company SMTP.COM and now we offer affordable highly reputable SMTP servers to our fellow Oempro users.

If you are having email delivery problems, having huge spam filtering issues, you don’t need to struggle with technical issues and settings to make your mail server redundant. Our new SMTP service will let you to send emails easily and provide you the highest delivery ratios.

For more information about the new SMTP service, please visit Octeth.SMTP.com website.

We integrated Octeth.SMTP.com feature into Oempro v3.6.7. Please check our next blog post about how to set it up in Oempro v3.6.7.

I think this is the best header for attracting the attention of email marketers and individuals who are interested in sending permission based mass emails to their lists.

The common misconception is the easiness of sending mass emails. Most of the people think that they can send emails through their “shared” hosting environments. This is a big mistake and will cause your email marketing campaign to fail.

Shared hosting accounts share the IP address of web server (and mail server) with tens or hundreds of other websites. This means that, all other accounts on the same shared hosting will use the same server resources and IP address(es) to send out emails or display website pages.

This kind of shared environments will cause your email not be delivered to the final recipient. Mostly, they will be “blocked” or “filtered” by email services because,

• Other website owner on the same server with you might have sent a spam email and caused your server IP address to get black listed
• The reverse DNS of your mail server IP will not point back to your domain. This will be a big headache for you and cause your emails to get rejected by major email services such as Hotmail.com
• Unable to set DKIM/DomainKeys validation on your server. This is another reason to get your emails filtered by Yahoo!, AOL, etc.
• Your server will probably get overloaded because it will be serving to tens of people at the same time while trying to send your emails

Several more reasons can be listed similar to the above ones. Even shared hosting is cheap and quite affordable, it’s a bad idea to use them as an application server (ex: running a PHP script which uses too much resource just like email sending) or mass emailing.

Our suggestion is to setup at least VPS (Virtual Private Server) or get a dedicated server. There are several hosting companies which offer quite affordable VPS and fully dedicated servers. They are more expensive than shared hostings but in the long-term, they will make your email marketing campaigns successful.

If you are still not convinced about reasons to move your applications to a VPS or dedicated server, read our next blog post which is an ideal solution for shared hosting users for sending mass emails.

As we announced earlier, next major version of Oempro, which is named as Oempro4 is under development and we are coming to the end of development phase. We will start the beta testing phase with 14 exclusive and 100+ beta testers in June. We expect to make Oempro4 public release ready by July. However, please note that the release date may change according to critical changes in development or beta testing phases.

In this post, I will give you brief explanation about new “built-in” payment system of Oempro4.

Oempro4 will include a built-in powerful payment and billing system. This unique feature will let you to set different payment plans and models for each one of your users and bill them automatically.

You can create different types of payment plans by mixing payment terms (such as pay-as-you-go, monthly fixed rate, bandwidth usage fee, etc.).

This feature will give you great ability to setup Sendloop.com similar online email marketing service with just a few clicks.

New Oempro4 user interface will let you to create payment plans on-the-fly and you will be able to manage your users (customers), their payment terms, balances, etc.

This feature one of the most popular requested features in our list and we are happy to integrate it into Oempro4.

My next showcase will be about the state-of-art Oempro4 white-labelling/rebranding features. Stay tuned.