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Email Options

Setting Addresses

In Email Settings you can configure both the incoming and outgoing email address.

Outgoing email address = When the Community sends an email out to a member this is the email address in the "From" field. Note that on our cloud services, the "From" field will always be noreply@invisioncloudcommunity.com but the Reply-To address will be the outgoing email address you set here.

Incoming email address = Some error pages display this email so your visitors know how to contact you and the Contact Us form sends messages to this address.

Technical Configuration

For our cloud services you do not have to configure anything to send email. However, you can optionally choose not to use our built-in email services and instead use your own SMTP, SendGrid, or other services.

Applies to self-hosted customers only

By default, the Suite will use your local server's PHP mail but some system administrators may want you to use SMTP.

You can find settings to enable these other email services on this page as well.

If your SMTP server requires SSL or TLS you may need to prefix your SMTP Host with ssl:// or tsl:// to have the system recognize these requirements.

When you change any email-related settings, always use the Test Settings button to be sure your changes are working. Email Error Logs can help you diagnose any issues.

Emailing Your Members

You can use the Bulk Mail feature to easily email all or a portion of your members.

There any many filters you can use to email only a subset of your member database. Ranging from by group, join date, last visit date, content count, and even what they have purchased in Commerce. You can customize who receives your emails and what they say.

Below you can see an example of these filters. You will see at the top, there are fields for 'About Me' and 'First Name'. These are custom profile fields, which can also be filtered

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Email Filters

The following members will never receive a bulk email regardless of what filters you choose:

  1. People who have not checked the "Receive email from admins" box either on sign up or in their account settings.
  2. Those who have clicked the unsubscribe link in previous bulk emails as this auto-unchecks the receive emails box.
  3. Members who are suspended/banned.

When you send a bulk email it will process in the background and can take some time to send depending on how many emails must be generated.

Applies to self-hosted customers only

If your web host or email provider cannot handle sending many emails at once, you can optionally add the following line to your constants.php to set a number to process per bulk mail cycle. In this example we are setting it to 25 per task cycle.

define ( 'BULK_MAILS_PER_CYCLE', 25 );

 

Customizing Emails

Right on the Email Settings page you can change the basic setting Primary email color and Email Logo. This is a quick setting to set the header colors and logo in the HTML email templates.

If you want to edit the actual email templates you can visit email appearance and have full control over both the HTML and plain text versions of all emails sent.

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You can edit both the "wrapper" which contains the overall template that all emails use or the specific content that goes inside the wrapper for email events. There is a list of all email events.

This is a useful feature if you want to add info to all emails (edit the wrapper) or just specific emails (edit the email for that event).

Email Debugging

You can write full email logs to disk. If you need to debug the emails being sent from the Community, you can create a folder (example here named _mail) with appropriate write permissions in your Community root directory, and then add in your constants.php (editing the example path provided):

define( 'EMAIL_DEBUG_PATH', "/full/path/to/the/folder/_mail" );

This will cause every email that is sent to be logged to a flat file under this _mail folder. The email will not actually be sent. You should not leave this on for long, especially on a production forum as it can generate a lot of logs.

  • The emails will not be delivered to the recipients
  • The files written are in plain text, and viewable via a web browser if you know the correct URL
  • A high-traffic forum can generate many hundreds or thousands of debug files in a day

The debug switch is useful to determine the raw contents of the email being sent to identify any problems, and to confirm the emails you expect to send are being generated and passed to the mail transport agent.

If you are looking for what error has been generated on an email that goes out prior to setting the above, you can see these within your email error logs.

See Also

You may also want to check on the Notification Settings as they define the defaults for when members receive emails based on actions on the Community.

Applies to self-hosted customers only

If you are being limited on mail by your hosting company, it may be worth taking a look at using an external email enhancement such as send grid for sending your emails. You can set this up from the Community Enhancements section of your ACP 

 


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