Newsletter Troubles

[Shopsite Novice]

Hi. I'm new to Zen Cart and to the Support Forum. I'm here because when I sent a newsletter to my customers, it came out in a plain text format without any spacing or formatting of any kind. I don't know what I did wrong and looking through the forum, I haven't found an answer to my problem.

I did the first one using the HTML editor and on the preview it looked lovely with bold fonts, bulleted lists, links etc. However the end result in peoples inbox was something quite different with just a large blob of text all running into each other.

In my second attempt, I entered it into the plain text area and used HTML coding to achieve the layout I wanted. Again on the preview it looked great. The sent item was only plain text with no formatting but at least it had paragraphs.

It made no difference if the user had selected HTML or Plain Text newsletters. Both were received in the same way.

I don't know what I have done wrong and would like to send my customers a well laid out and interesting newsletter.

Can anybody help me? I really like Zen Cart but seem to have a few glitchy things to sort out. I am contemplating upgrading to 1.3 but am a little nervous when I am still so new to this and the bulk of my shop is working well. Don't want to break it.

[DrByte]

For people wanting to do frequent HTML newsletter mailings to large groups of people, I usually recommend a combination of the Email Address Exporter contribution and the Groupmail Windows application.

The reason for this is the varying configurations of each webserver as it relates to how the webserver talks to the mailserver and how Zen Cart interacts between the customer database and the HTML generation for the mass mailing activity. There are often timeouts while sending the newsletters from Zen Cart, leaving you uncertain with the status of who got what, etc. This will be addressed in a future version of Zen Cart, but for now is limited to smaller audiences or very well-tuned servers, etc.

[Shopsite Novice]

Thank you Dr Byte. I have downloaded both those items and will have a go again. I really appreciate the prompt help.

[Don Ho]

This is the SAME problem I am having - What is the Fix on this?

[Shopsite Novice]

Hi Don

I did as Dr Byte suggested and downloaded Group Mail and the Email Exporter. Both are working fine.

I don't think there is a fix, just found it was easier to use these other products.

Group Mail is a completely separate piece of software. The email exporter allows you to export your list of email addresses out of zen cart and then you can import them into group mail.

Hope this helps.

Kind Regards