I've been working hard to get the mojoPortal newsletter feature ready and I plan to make a release this weekend. I'll blog more about that later as there are a lot of new things since the last release. For now I just want to mention that I'll be comitting the newsletter feature to svn trunk in the next few hours for anyone who is eager to get it and anyone who might be able to help test it. I've done preliminary testing in all the data layers and it seems to work in all of them.

This first release of this feature should be considered an alpha. I haven't done eveything with it I want to yet but its at a usable point and will improve by use and feedback. Email does not lend itself to testing, I mean you either send an email or you don't send it. I've tested it on short lists and I've tested simulating long lists with some thread sleeping but thats not a very good simulation.

I've just updated this site with the latest build and created 2 Newletters, mojoPortal News which will be a real newsletter and Temporary Test List which I'm hoping some of you will join so that I can better test the sending of mail to the list. I will send to this list a lot while testing and will ask for replies to verify that the mail is received, but once satisfied its working well this list will stop. So please login now and visit the My Profile page to opt in to my lists.

The mail gets sent on a new thread so it doesn't interfere with the UI. There is a new Task Queue Monitor page where you can check the progress. If the application recycles while sending the mail it will kill the thread and therefore stop the process from sending but it is designed to resume where it left off when the application start event is fired.

More work needs to be done in creating some email templates. There are 2 not too great ones included. Email templates are a pain compared to regular html because you can only get consistent styling in different email clients by using in-line style. Trying to use images in the mail is also problematic. I'll be investigating solutions for these challenges to improve future versions.

This first implementation requires the user to be registered in the site to opt into the list, eventually I may make an opt in option for non registered users. I'll be working on and testing the opt out feature tomorrow to make sure its ready for the release.