Here’s how you test emails in the system before making them live.

Testing Autoresponder Emails

1. Create a test DAP Product called “Test Product”
2. Set up the email drip for this product
3. Give yourself (or a new test user, but with a real email id that belongs to you) access to this DAP Product on the Users > Manage page (for existing users) or Users > Add page for new users
4. Run the hourly-cron manually, by going to http://YourSite.com/dap/dap-cron.php . That should send out the day 1 drip for that test user.
5. Go to Users > Manage page, and back-date the Access Start Date for this test user for the test product, back by one day. So DAP now thinks he bought the product “Yesterday”.
6. Now run the cron manually again. This time, DAP will send out the day #2 drip for this user.
7. So every time, move the user’s access start date back by as many days as you want, to trigger that day’s autoresponder email. And each time run the cron manually.

Testing Broadcast Emails

1. Create a test DAP Product called “Test Product” (or if you have previously created one above, then use the same one)
2. Add 3-4 test users to this product
3. On the Emails > Broadcast page, schedule a broadcast email to be sent to “All Users of Product <<Test Product>>”
4. Run the hourly-cron manually, by going to http://YourSite.com/dap/dap-cron.php . That should send out the broadcast to that test product.
5. Log in to the email id’s of all the test users that you added to this product, and make sure the email arrived in the inbox.

Problem: You see emails sent to your DAP Admin email account that look like this:

paypalCoupon.php: missing item_name

-or-

paypalCoupon.php: No such Product found – SomeProductNameHere

This could be happening because….

a) Some robot software somewhere is auto-posting to that URL.

b) It’s possible that a search engine spider or spambot is hopping from link to link, submitting the form repeatedly from the backend, and because the form is being submitted in an illegal/invalid fashion, DAP is complaining about a missing coupon code.

So for now, if everything else is working ok, and the annoying email is the the only issue, then you can just ignore those emails. Or better yet, simply put a filter on that email subject and have it directly sent to the trash folder in your email client.

If you or your members are noticing strange characters in emails – especially where there should normally be a single or double quote, then these are due to what are known as “Smart Quotes”.

These special characters always show up when you copy text from a WordPress blog (some themes use these characters) or a Microsoft Word document.

Single quote:

'(correct)

`(incorrect)

Double quote:

" (correct)

`` (incorrect)

The single quote that works correctly is located next to the “Enter” key.

The incorrect one is located next to the “1″ number key.

So copy your email text to a text editor, like notepad. Then change all single quotes to be ‘ and all double-quotes to be “ in your emails. Then put them back into DAP, and then test.

The “strange characters” issue should then be resolved.

NOTE: In a future version, we will implement an enhancement in DAP so that DAP can handle this automatically, but for now, the above solution is your only option.

The Problem

• Your autoresponder or broadcast emails are not going out (hourly cron job dap-cron.php)
• Your Affiliates aren’t being credited with sales (hourly cron job dap-cron.php)
• Your 1SiteAutomation/1ShoppingCart Orders are not being processed. (10-minute cron job dap-emailorder.php)

The Solution

One possible solution is that your cron job(s) aren’t running correctly.

DAP has two cron jobs. One that runs once an hour (dap-cron.php), and one that runs every 10 minutes (dap-emailorder.php).

You can see how to set them up here.

But in this post, we will see how to make sure your cron is actually set up correctly, or if it’s running correctly.

How To Know If Cron Is Running

1. Go to System > Logs and click on “Empty Logs”. That will fully clear out all logs.
2. Go to Setup > Config > Basic and set “DAP Log Level” to “5″ and update row.
3. Wait for the top of the hour for the hourly cron job to run. So if the time when you’re doing this, is say 11:20 AM, then wait for 12:00 Noon. If time is 3:45 PM, then wait for 4:00 PM.
4. A few minutes past the top of the hour and go back to the System > Logs screen.
5. If you see hundreds of lines of text in the logs, then that means your cron job is running correctly. If you only see maybe 10-20 lines of text, then your cron job is NOT running correctly, and you need to make sure the cron job is actually set up correctly.

DAP integrates with GetResponse very easily.

How it works

If you are on DAP 4.1, then DAP can connect with getresponse using the APIs provided by getresponse.

So when someone buys or signs up for that Product, then DAP will automatically notify your GetResponse list, and add the buyer or subscriber (if it’s a free sign-up) to your GetResponse list.

1) Retrieve the getresponse API Key from this URL:

http://www.getresponse.com/my_api_key.html

2) Then go to DAP products page, select the product and under the Notify Plugin section, add the following:

Notify Plugin upon User -> Product Activation (Add) =>
getresponse:<your API key>:<compaign_name>

For ex -

getresponse:89kjhjgjfhgf76ikghkgk:MYCOMP

That’s it.

Now go to DAP admin -> add users page and add a brand new user / email and see what happens.

The added user shd first receive the confirmation email from getresponse and upon confirmation, the user shd get added to getresponse .

If it does not work, then set the dap log level to 5, go to dap system logs-> Empty log content, and rerun the test.
Then send us the log snippet from dap system -> logs.

That’s it.

Subscriber Flow

The flow of subscriber is “FROM DAP TO Mailchimp“. User signs up at DAP first, then DAP automatically adds the user to Mailchimp list.. Admin removes the user’s access to a product, and DAP automatically removes the user from Mailchimp list. This feature is available starting DAP v4.1.

How it works

1. Login to your account at http://admin.mailchimp.com/account/api/ and note down the API Key.

Image 1:

2. Go to http://admin.mailchimp.com/lists/ and grab your List’s Unique Id. Click the “settings” link for the list – the Unique Id is at the bottom of that page.

Image 2:

3. Log in to your DAP Admin Dashboard -> Products Page and select the product (whose members you wish to add automatically to your Mailchimp list.

4. If the list Id of the mailchimp list that you want to integrate with a DAP product/membership is say “ffffffffff”, and say your Mailchimp API Key is ‘ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff-us2′ then add the following to the “Notify Plugin upon User -> Product Activation (Add)” in DAP products page and HIT Save/Update Product.

mailchimp:ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff-us2:ffffffffff

Image 3:

That’s it!

Save the product and this completes the DAP->Mailchimp integration.

How This Works

So let’s say you picked the list “ffffffffff” in your Mailchimp account, and the DAP Product “Example Subscription Product” (as shown in the screenshots above).

So once you add “mailchimp:ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff-us2:ffffffffff” to the product’s “Notify plugin upon user->product activation” and “Notify plugin upon user->product de-activation” field and save it, every time someone gets access to the “Example Subscription Product” product (regardless of whether they buy it, or you give them access on the backend), DAP will  automatically  add them to the list – ffffffffff. And everytime you remove the user’s access to product (click on ‘Remove’ in DAP manage users page), DAP will automatically remove the user from the list.

Starting DAP v3.9, DAP allows you to send out HTML content in all of the following:

1. Double-optin email body
2. Thank-you email body
3. Autoresponder email body, and
4. Broadcast email body

DAP can send out “Multi-part” emails – that is, emails that have both a “text” portion, and an “HTML” portion. If there are any email clients out there that cannot handle HTML email (in the year 2010, there are really no such clients, really), then the “text” portion of the same email will be shown to the recipient.

To send out HTML emails, it is very important that you insert the HTML Email Start Tag – [HTML_START] – into the body of your email before you insert any HTML tags.

The same goes for any email that you want to send out in HTML format. Just before you start your HTML tags, just be sure to insert the HTML Email Start Tag – [HTML_START].

And the HTML you insert should be full-blown HTML, starting with the <html><body>…. tags.

That’s it!

Uploading file to be attached

First upload file(s) to be attached to the emails, to the folder…

/dap/admin/attachments/

Attaching it to Autoresponder Emails

On the Email > Autoresponders page, any file(s) uploaded above, show up as in the image below. When composing a new email, just click on the “add” link next to the file name to be attached to that email.

Attaching it to Broadcast Emails

Same deal for broadcast emails. The uploaded file shows up as follows. Click on the “add” link to add to the broadcast email to be sent.

Problem: Someone buys a product from your site, and you can see in the DAP  “Manage Users”  page that they have been added as a user, but that user never gets an email with their login/password. All they get is the confirmation email from the payment processor.

You want to know: “How can I get my users to automatically receive a “welcome” email with their Id/password” from DAP?”

If the users got added and the user status is “A” in the DAP manage users page, but the user did not receive welcome email with their ID/Password, it could because:

No Thank-You Email Setup

For that product, you did not set the ‘thank-you’ email subject/body in the DAP Products Page.

Select the product in DAP products page and set the thank-you message content as shown below.

Thank-You Email Setup, But Still No Email

You have set up the thank-you email message, but the email still did not get delivered.

Solution 1

The only time the Welcome Email is sent, is when a user is given access to a Product for the very first time. If you are trying to add a user to a product, and the user already has been given access to the product, then it won’t send out the welcome email the second (or subsequent) time(s). So make sure the user you’re testing with does not already have access to that Product. If she does, then remove access to the product before testing again.

Solution 2

Go to DAP Setup > Config > Basic and make sure the “Admin Email” is set to an ‘email address that resides on your domain/hosting account where DAP is installed’ instead of say a gmail or hotmail or yahoo email address. Now, if you have done everything in terms of making sure there’s no reverse DNS lookup issues with your host but if there are still users who do not receive emails (and the email is not in their spam folder) :

Here’s what you can do:
1) Setup dap to generate default password (dap setup -> config -> advanced) and instruct users to change their password right after they log in.
OR
2) Set up an autoresponder email in DAP to drip day 1 with the merge tag for login id/password. So even if the thank-you email is not delivered right after purchase, when the cron runs at the top of the hour, it will send out the id/password again.. in case they did not receive it the first time.

You can have dap connect to 3rd party smtp service like AuthSMTP.com to send out all autoresponder/broadcast emails for better email deliverability.

BTW, if you have tried everything and still the emails are not getting delivered or is landing in the SPAM folder, then please checkout our documentation on troubleshooting email delivery here:

http://www.digitalaccesspass.com/doc/troubleshooting-email-delivery

The only time a new user shows up with the status “Unconfirmed” is if you have “Double Optin” turned on for that product to which he just got access.

When you have double-optin turned on, then their initial status is “Unconfirmed” because you want them to click on the “Double Optin” link and confirm their intent to get access to your product, after which their status is automatically changed to “Confirmed”.

So to make sure Users are always created with “Confirmed” status, just remove all text from the “Double Optin Body” and “Double Optin Subject” of the Product in question.

Sidebar

If your product is a “Paid” product, then obviously, you don’t want people who just bought your product by filling out a shopping cart, to have to go through another double-optin confirmation process. So for paid products, you should probably not force double-optin.

Double-optin is best when you’re signing up free users for a free product via the DAP Direct-signup Form.