Tag: Gmail

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SMTP Pro with Magento: A sort-of user guide.

This blog post is about the SMTP Pro extension. It is my attempt at full explanations to some very good questions/feedback from Chris Last in his comment on an earlier post. I decided that I should give thorough explanations to the questions and they probably belong in a blog post rather than a reply comment. Hopefully it’ll form a mini user-guide, I’ll try to update it as such over time.

Update July 2013: I have since released a premium extension for sending email using Amazon SES called MageSend, if you’re having toruble sending email with Magento, please check it out, it was created to solve many common Magento email issues.

There are too many sections in Config->Advanced->System for me to make complete sense of:

Mail Sending Settings – do these have any effect?
Disable Email Communications No
Host localhost
Port (25) 25
Set Return-Path no

1) The Mail Sending Settings are the built in Magento ones, they don’t work very well for custom SMTP servers and you can safely ignore them. One thing to note though. I do adhere to their disable configuration in my extension. So if you disable all emails using the core config here, all emails do stop even if sending via SMTP Pro.
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Magento 1.5.0.1 and SMTPPro 1.4.2 Now Working – Free Gmail/SMTP, ahoy!

There have been several reports of my SMTP Pro email extension failing on Magento 1.5. I hadn’t tested or recommended installing it on Magento 1.5 and wasn’t going to for a little while. You could say I’m not really an early adopter when it comes to Magento versions.

However, the ever helpful Rhonda (@rondata) from Magento got in touch with me late last week to report there may have been a packaging problem with my extension that has made it unable to be used on the new Magento Connect. So I thought if I was going to repackage it, I may as well also fix it up for Magento 1.5 – and so here is SMTPPro version 1.4.2.

As always you can download the package manually here (or via Magento Connect) to check it out before you install it manually.

I have tested the extension on Magento 1.4.2 and 1.5.0.1, also tested a Magento Connect install on 1.5.0.1. Everything seems to be in order. The change in 1.5 was a move to array based email addresses and names in the Email_Template class.

I still feel like it’s shoddy OO that I have to override an entire method and duplicate all the logic in it just to swap in my SMTP transport configuration. For those that care, I did try some techniques to avoid it, but the default transport is explicitly set by the core code if a return path is set, which invalidates anything I can do in a subclass – short of temporarily hijacking the return path configuration, which I may resort to doing in the next release.

In the process of testing a Magnto Connect install I did see a very cool feature in the latest Magento, and I may just have missed it in the earlier releases as I seldom use Magento Connect anymore.

Upload a Package directly

Installing a package directly from within the downloader module will surely make the day of many commercial extension developers – at least until they can sell extensions directly on Magento Connect*.

Anyway, that’s about it – the new version supports 1.5, and can be downloaded/installed on Magento Connect. Go enjoy some free SMTP/Google Apps/Gmail email sending! Please let me know if you have any problems or spot any bugs.

* Speaking of which, I wonder what % Magento will take… Apple set a pretty high benchmark at 30%. Magento doesn’t quite have the same kung-fu grip on distribution though so maybe it’ll be lower.

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New Version of SMTP Pro now supports Magento 1.4.2 and has fewer bugs

I’ve been neglecting my Magento extensions a bit lately and it somewhat ironically caught up with me yesterday. We’re developing a new store on Magento 1.4.2 and when it came to setting up the Google Apps email I naturally enough installed my own extension (that is why I built it, after all). This post describes the fixes and changes in the latest version of my SMTP Pro Magento email extension.

I found a number of issues with it, one related to the sub-directory install, one related to multi-store and others to do with the Magento version, that needed to be fixed (in a hurry). So to those of you reporting issues over the last month or so, sorry for the delay getting to them. Better late than never eh Fontis.

In addition to testing with Magento 1.4.2 which I can confirm works, here’s what I have fixed/changed:

  • Fixed the self-test when running it from a webstore installed in a subdirectory.
  • Fixed the Cannot set standard header from addHeader() exception. It was caused by an upgrade to Zend in Magento 1.4.2. Reported here.
  • Added German translations which I got from Thomas at NetResearch, Many thanks! (and apologies for taking months to finally roll them out).
  • Added better logging around the ‘not valid for send’ state.
  • Fixed the 404 error you get when running self-test on a store with the ‘use store code in url’ setting turned on. I suspect this may have been causing a few issues.

The SMTP extension is available on Magento Connect or you may prefer to download your Magento connect extensions manually. The release file for SMTP Pro version 1.4.0 is available here if you like to install Magento extensions manually.

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Latest version of SMTP Pro Finally Uploaded to Magento Connect

Geez it’s been a long time coming thanks to Invalid package.xml format errors and duplicate maintainers and goodness-knows-what else. You can finally get the latest version of SMTP Pro – 1.3.4 – even though it’s identical to 1.3. (thank Magento Connect…).

For those who want to install the Magento extension manually (and if you are engineering Magento you probably should) – you can get version 1.3.4 of SMTP Pro here.

If you read my last post on the improvements, you’ll know that it has some great new features for sending, and logging email in Magento using either SMTP or Gmail/Google Apps. So please give it a try and let me know what you think.

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New Magento SMTP features: Email logging and email sending events

I had a longer than usual train ride on Friday, thanks to missing my usual one by about 20 seconds! The good news is, during the extended train ride I have added some new functionality to my SMTP Pro magento extension – it now optionally logs all emails to a database table and you can view the detail of them from within the Magento admin interface. I still can’t upload it to Magento connect however, so please download the release from here and let me know how it goes. Update: Fixed bug pointed out by Luis below – new release is 1.1.1.

I have also added a nice little event firing mechanism – I’m inviting fellow developers to suggest events they want fired, to make manipulating outbound emails easier for other extension developers. Currently the only one is smtppro_email_after_send but there is scope for adding many more – contact me!

I’ll add some notes about the new functionality below, but just to recap using my free smtp extension for Magento you can now:

  • Configure Magento for sending email with any SMTP server
  • Easily configure Magento to send email with GMail or Google Apps Email
  • Diagnose connection problems using the email self test
  • Send using a number of different gmail/google addresses if your email volumes are very high
  • Enable a development mode and an email suppression mode
  • View a log of all email sent from within Magento, the date they were sent and search and filter the list of emails
  • Hook into a growing number of email related events to extend the email capability of Magento

All for free too, I think it compares favorably with the commercial extensions that offer the same functionality. I’d appreciate any opinions on that, as I’m aiming to have the best email extension for Magento. Anyway here’s some info about the new features, in case you care.
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