Octeth v6.0.7 is out today.
The headline is RSS-to-email, which moves from a plug-in into Octeth itself. Around it come global search in the new interface, team members who can work on campaigns without seeing your contacts, optional Google sign-in, saved message content for the email gateway, an Overview tab on campaign reports and smoother SMS sending.
RSS Feeds in Emails, Without a Plug-in
Pulling the latest posts from a blog or a news feed into a newsletter is one of the oldest tricks in email marketing, and it still works. In Octeth it used to depend on the RSS plug-in, which had to be enabled and only rendered feeds in some places.
In v6.0.7, RSS blocks are part of the core product. They render in every send path, in test sends, in the web browser view and in previews. A new user group permission, "Insert RSS feeds into emails", decides who can use them, and every existing group receives it on upgrade, so nobody loses access.
The new interface's email editors gain an "Insert RSS feed" dialog. Paste the feed address, choose how many items and which fields to show, check the live preview and insert the block. Content with RSS blocks also previews with the real feed items, so what you see before sending is what subscribers will get.
We also fixed a long-standing annoyance with the length tags that trim feed titles and content. A trimmed value could end in the middle of an HTML tag, an entity or a multi-byte character, which broke layouts and mangled non-English text. Length tags now count characters and keep the HTML intact.
The RSS plug-in is retired. Existing RSS blocks keep rendering with the same output.
Global Search
As accounts grow, finding one campaign or one subscriber turns into clicking through lists and filters. The new interface now has a search box in the top bar, also available with Cmd/Ctrl+K. One search covers subscribers, campaigns, lists, journeys, templates, segments and SMS campaigns, and takes you straight to the result.
Team Members Without Contact Data
Agencies, freelancers and designers often build campaigns and journeys for an account without any reason to see the contact list behind them. Until now, giving someone access to the account meant giving them access to the subscribers too.
Account owners can now invite team members without access to contact data. These team members work on campaigns and journeys, but they cannot read, import or export subscribers. For anyone who handles personal data under privacy rules, this makes outside help much easier to justify. The change went through a security review before it was merged.
Google Sign-in for the New Interface
The new interface can offer "Continue with Google" on its sign-in and sign-up pages. It is off until an operator turns it on, and two-factor authentication still applies, so a Google sign-in does not skip the protections an account already has.
Saved Email Gateway Message Content
When a customer asks "what exactly did we send to this person?", the email gateway's event log could show that a message was delivered, but not what it said. Each user group can now keep the content of its gateway messages for 1 to 31 days. The subject, HTML, text part and attachment list appear on the event log next to the delivery events, with HTML shown safely and remote images blocked until you ask for them.
It is off by default, because storing message content is a decision each operator should make for their own customers. Saving content never delays or fails a delivery.
Delivery Servers per Message Type
Staff can now assign a customer separate delivery servers for marketing, transactional and auto responder email. A customer whose newsletters and password resets need different reputations no longer has to share one server for both.
Campaign Reports and Scheduling
Email and SMS campaign reports gain an Overview tab. It shows the content as it was sent and every setting of the campaign: sender, reply-to, sender domain, schedule, timezone, audience, exclusions, A/B settings and the rest. When a report looks surprising, the answer to "how was this campaign set up?" is now one click away instead of a trip back into the editor.
Scheduled campaigns show a countdown and the exact start time with its timezone, in both the campaign list and the report header. No more guessing whether "10:00" meant your time or the campaign's.
Custom HTML email editors gain a Visual / HTML toggle, so a user who does not write HTML can still make a quick text change. The HTML stays the source of truth: content the visual editor cannot keep stays in HTML mode with a notice, and content it would reformat shows a warning first. The date range picker also adds Today and Yesterday presets.
SMS: Smoother Sending and Honest Click Counts
An SMS campaign with a per-minute rate used to send that minute's messages in the first second. Carriers read a burst like that as a flood. Sends are now spread evenly across the minute.
Keitaro clicks on SMS links were missing from click totals, segments and reports. They now count as SMS clicks, and the upgrade records them for clicks stored before it, so click figures for campaigns with Keitaro links will rise. The SMS campaign report also reads better: the campaign name appears once, status reasons are explained in words, progress is labeled correctly and conversions have their own section.
SMS campaigns now also work when the list's phone field is a global custom field. Before, they failed, and a failed estimate retried without end.
Plug-in Permissions on API Calls
This one is a security fix. User groups decide which plug-ins a user can use, and the legacy user area always respected that. API calls, including every action in the new interface, did not: plug-ins ran for every user regardless of their group. Now a user's API calls run only the plug-ins their group includes, and plug-in API commands are refused for a user whose group does not include the plug-in.
Other Improvements
- Journey time windows in their own timezone. A ScheduledPull journey trigger can evaluate its time window in a timezone you choose, instead of the account's.
- Simpler sender domain subdomains. A subdomain of a verified sender domain no longer needs its own ownership TXT record.
- Gateway delivery events under strict API checks. PowerMTA accounting events kept arriving only when the API parameter check was relaxed. They now arrive in every mode.
- Segment builder. The "Bounce type is No bounce" rule works again, and statuses that cannot match anything are no longer offered.
- Faster staff delivery metrics that read only the periods you ask for.
- Cleaner upgrades that remove new-interface build files a release replaced, keeping a backup of each.
If You Run Octeth for Others
A few changes can affect your users or integrations. Plug-ins now follow user group permissions for API calls, so a plug-in may stop acting for accounts whose group does not include it. Keitaro clicks now count as SMS clicks, which matters to any integration that adds the two together. RSS blocks now render on installations that never had the RSS plug-in enabled.
Please read the Upgrade Notes in the changelog and the API behavior changes page before you upgrade an installation that other systems call.
What Comes Next
The next release follows on the usual two-week schedule. If you use RSS-to-email or bring outside help into your account, I would like to hear what you would want from those features next.
Already an Octeth client? Log in to the Octeth Client Area to download v6.0.7.
Running your own email and SMS infrastructure and want to see what Octeth looks like on it? Tell us about your setup through the contact form at octeth.com/demo/.
