WSN Knowledge Base

Emailing Files

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:21:40 GMT

Sometimes you may want to let people attach a file with their email message in the contact form, email member, email article page or the like. This is possible since version 7.0.41. Here's how:

1. In the template where the email form is filled out, make sure enctype="multipart/form-data" is set on the form element. For the contact form, for example:

2. Add your file attachment fields in the form where you want them. Name them mailfiles1, mailfiles2, etc (only the actual filename attached is displayed in the email the recipient gets) and add as many as you like. For example:

Attach a file: <input type="file" name="mailfiles1">

Second file: <input type="file" name="mailfiles2">

Limitations: This won't work for bulk-email, like the admin panel send email page forms. It's incompatible with the send-all-emails-as-MIME option (in that it will ignore HTML and send as plain text).

Not Getting Digest Emails

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:17:30 GMT

If some digests are getting through but others aren't, compare the number of members you have with the number of daily hits on the particular WSN installation you're dealing with here and the number of emails per queue being sent. Go to Admin Panel -> E-Mails -> E-mail Preferences -> "Number of emails to send at a time from queue:" to check how many are sent per page. If that number is 10 and you have 10,000 members integrated from a discussion forum, but the links directory you're dealing with only gets 10 visits a day, only about 100 digests will get sent out per day. This is because PHP can only run when someone requests a page, so it can only send out digests when someone visits. You can increase the number sent per page, but not too much or the pages will become noticably slow or error out at very large numbers.

A solution to get more emails sent without slowing pages is manufacture more (fake) visitors. You can do this on a unix or linux operating system by setting up a system cron -- please note this is NOT the same as the crons page in the WSN admin panel (WSN crons are php-based so can only run when people are viewing pages). Your hosting control panel should offer you a way to set a cron. If you have CPanel, you'll find a "cron jobs" option in the menu. Select "standard" experience level. Supply

wget yoursite/wsn/index.php

as the command -- replacing yoursite/wsn with the URL of your WSN installation first. Set it to run every minute. That should handle an additional 14,400 digests per day. If you need to handle more than that, you may need to set up another cron. You can also increase your items per queue on the email settings page to more than 10, but don't set it too high or the page will take forever when someone wants to view it.

Note: you may find that you can increase the queue if you use SMTP to send mail.

Bounced E-Mail Detector

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 06:30:25 GMT

WSN's bounced email detector helps you save server load and avoid being mistaken for a spammer (sending too many repeated messages to an address that rejects them can land you on shared blacklists which prevent your messages from getting through to other people in the future). It reads bounce notifications and automatically processes them for you. All emails to the deceased address are halted until the member updates their account or article. When the member next logs in, they see an alert on the page informing them that delivery to their email address failed and instructing them to update it. If they wish to re-try the failed address, they can edit without changing it.

You'll need to set up your bounce collector account as a real email account (not forwarder). Make sure you don't use the account for any legitimate email exchanges, because the sender of every message to the bounces account has their email deactivated in WSN and then the message is deleted. Ideally you should set a disk quota of no more than 5 MB on the bounces account -- tens of megabytes worth of messages will cause it to choke before it can process even one. Your hosting control panel will offer a way to set up the account. Ask your web host for help if necessary.

In versions prior to WSN 8.1.0, you run the bounce detector manually at Admin Panel -> Emails -> Bounce Detector and follow the on-screen instructions. Since 8.1.0 this has changed to an automatic process, where WSN checks on your behalf every 12 hours. If the IMAP login fails, WSN will send you an email notification.

Re-Approving E-Mail Addresses

If you want to give an email address another try, just edit the member or article it's associated with (whether it's your own or someone else's doesn't matter). Submitting the edit without changes will give the email another try.

Occasionally, you may want to re-approve all email addresses in bulk. For example, if you had a hacking problem on the server where someone was sending out a lot of spam which got you blacklisted then you may want to re-try after you've cleaned out the hack and asked various blacklists to reinstate you. To do this, go to Admin -> Miscellaneous -> Advanced and run these queries in the SQL box:
UPDATE {PREFIX}members SET inactiveemail=0;
UPDATE {PREFIX}links SET inactiveemail=0;

Custom E-Mail Form Fields

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 18:20:31 GMT

There are a number of areas in WSN which are used to send an email based on information typed into a form -- the email article page, email member page, email submitter, contact form, et cetera. Suppose you want more than the generic "type your message" box. Just type your new form field in the template, and edit the corresponding email to use {FORMFIELDNAME} (that's {FORM + FIELDNAME + }) to display the value the user supplies where you want it displayed in the email.

As an example, here's how you'd add a dropdown of "department" options for the contact form:
1) Edit the contact form template to insert your field:
<select name="department">
<option value="Human Resources">Human Resources</option>
<option value="Information Technology">Information Technology</option>
<option value="Other">Other</option>
</select>
2) Go to Admin -> E-mails -> Edit Outgoing E-mails and edit email_contactformbody to add {FORMDEPARTMENT} where you want it displayed.

Customizing Emails

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 12:43:27 GMT

Before using any email functions, you must supply an administrative email address on your settings page. This is the address that will appear on the "From" line of all outgoing emails.

WSN automatically sends out emails for many purposes, including but not limited to validation notifications, emailed articles, reported articles or posts, new suggested articles, and activation codes when email confirmation of new members is required. (You may choose not to send some of these in your email preferences.) You can customize the text of all of these emails in your language section. In your admin panel, click 'edit outgoing emails' in your email section. It will show you a list of all email text. In general, subject lines are named as language variables ending in subject and the full messages are named ending in body.

When done, click 'update all language' and your changes to the emails will be saved.

Note: If you've enabled MIME in your email preferences, you can use HTML in the text of all emails.