The Mass Email feature allows website administrator to send newsletter to the users of the iAuto-based website en masse. It can become a great promotional feature for the marketing campaign and complement other tools used for web promotion.

You can add a new email in Admin Panel -> User Management -> Mass Email -> Compose New Email

You can select the following options for a newsletter:

• Send to the User Groups — you can check the User Groups which will receive the newsletter. Please note that you can select a User Group if it has at least one user agreed to subscribe to the news from your website. You can see the number of users who will be included to the mailing list.
• BCC to the Website Administrator Notification Email — if checked, the newsletter will be sent as a blind carbon copy to the website administrator to the email specified as a notification email. BCC addresses are not listed in the message data, remaining invisible to other recipients.
• Mail Attachments — you can add the attachments to the emails and remove them. The attachments are stored on your server in /files/mass_email_attachments

In emails you can use the variables of the "user" object and global variables, including custom settings.

They can be the following:

• {$user.username} - displays the username
• {$user.Firstname} {$user.Lastname} - displays user's first name and last name
• {$GLOBALS.custom_settings.site_name} - displays the website name specified in Admin Panel -> Custom Settings
• {$GLOBALS.site_url} - displays the URL of the website.

When the email is finished, you can either "Save" it or "Save and Send", which means that the email will be placed to the sending queue.

The emails have 4 states:

• Draft — emails saved for later. You can edit messages with this status for further mailing.
• Awaiting dispatch — emails placed to the sending queue. You can cancel the dispatch for the emails with this status. Canceled email will get the status "Draft".
• In progress — emails that are being sent to recipients at this moment. You can cancel the dispatch for the emails with this status. Canceled email will get the status "Canceled" to indicate that the email has been sent to some recipients from the mailing list - this information is available in the email report.
• Sent — emails already sent to recipients. Sent emails can be replicated to a new email, edited if necessary and sent again, so there is no need to copy and paste the content, formatting and attachments.
• Canceled — emails with the canceled in-progress delivery. Canceled emails were sent to some of the recipients which are listed in email report.

Each newsletter has the link to unsubscribe from the website's news.

All newsletters are stored in the database within the number of days specified in the Email Settings. Afterwards they are deleted.

You need to configure the email settings before using the Mass Email functionality. You can do this in Admin Panel -> System Configuration -> System Settings -> Email Settings.

• System Email — the website uses this email address to send notification emails to users and website administrator. The System Email is an email account configured on your server and maintained by your mail server settings. Thus, you cannot use external email addresses like on Google Mail (@gmail.com) or on Yahoo.
• Notification Email — email address where notification emails are sent.
• Reply-To — email used as a reply-to address when recipients reply to a newsletter.
• Return-Path — email address to which bounce messages are delivered.
• Number of Emails in a Batch — number of emails sent in one portion. For example, you can specify 10 emails in a batch which means that dispatching cron job will send 10 emails at once.
• Email Batch Sending Lag (in minutes) — time period between email group dispatch.
• Store Sent Emails (in days) — database keeps sent emails for specified number of days. Draft emails are kept until they are sent.

Emails are sent by the cron job, which should be configured on your server. We recommend to run the following cron job command each minute: wget -q 'http://yourwebsite.com/system/mass_email/send_mass_email?log=1' -o - > /dev/null

Please keep in mind that the cron job runtime must not be more than the "Email Batch Sending Lag" value.