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I had a longer than usual train ride on Friday, thanks to missing my usual one by about 20 seconds! The good news is, during the extended train ride I have added some new functionality to my SMTP Pro magento extension – it now optionally logs all emails to a database table and you can view the detail of them from within the Magento admin interface. I still can’t upload it to Magento connect however, so please download the release from here and let me know how it goes. Update: Fixed bug pointed out by Luis below – new release is 1.1.1.

I have also added a nice little event firing mechanism – I’m inviting fellow developers to suggest events they want fired, to make manipulating outbound emails easier for other extension developers. Currently the only one is smtppro_email_after_send but there is scope for adding many more – contact me!

I’ll add some notes about the new functionality below, but just to recap using my free smtp extension for Magento you can now:

• Configure Magento for sending email with any SMTP server
• Easily configure Magento to send email with GMail or Google Apps Email
• Diagnose connection problems using the email self test
• Send using a number of different gmail/google addresses if your email volumes are very high
• Enable a development mode and an email suppression mode
• View a log of all email sent from within Magento, the date they were sent and search and filter the list of emails
• Hook into a growing number of email related events to extend the email capability of Magento

All for free too, I think it compares favorably with the commercial extensions that offer the same functionality. I’d appreciate any opinions on that, as I’m aiming to have the best email extension for Magento. Anyway here’s some info about the new features, in case you care.
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I was so very excited about presenting at the Magento Developer Conference but thanks to the Volcano in Iceland, I was instead grounded in Dubai – I got to within 2 hours of London, check this out for a bizarre flight path.

Turned back 2 hours away from LHR - thanks volcanic ash!

Anyway – Dubai turned out to be a fairly interesting place – I got to ride a camel and snowboard in a shopping mall. Emirates were very good to us as well, so I really cannot complain. I’ll put up a blog post with some content that would have been in my presentation in case anyone is interested.

With a bit of luck there will be another Magento conference in the future, and I’ll get to head along to that one. I’ll look forward to it.

I’ve had a couple of fellow Magento users contact me over the last couple of weeks about the 500 emails per day Google Apps and Gmail limit. I’m sure it’s in the class of good problems to have when you have more than 500 order related emails, or new customer sign-ups everyday! In this post I’ll detail my simple solution to the 500 email limit that Google imposed on their Gmail and Google Apps accounts when you are using an account as your transactional email sending account for Magento.

First, the problem is that you can only send 500 emails per day through Gmail or Google Apps – that’s fair enough, the accounts are supposed to be suitable for humans, not Magento stores. Also, you can pay for premier and get 2000 emails, so that’s not too bad either for $50/user!

Never fear though, I have modified my extension to help out. Basically here is how the change works, and how it is implemented. You can get the new version over on Magento Connect

Update: you can’t at the moment, so download directly from me for the time being.

Update: Thanks to Paulius there is a specially packaged version of the extension that will make it easy to install manually until I can get the Magento Connect version updated (which is still failing). Get that version here!

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I have finally finished my Magento SMTP, Gmail and Google Apps Email combined extension. It will be available on Magento Connect shortly (as soon as Varien fix the little bugs in the ’submit extension’ interface – namely version and stability appear to be required and missing from the form.

I won’t bore you with the details again – but I have tested this working on version 1.4 of Magento (along with 1.2 and 1.3 as always). So for those of you having trouble with email on Magento 1.4 – give this alpha release of my SMTP, Gmail and Google Apps email Magento extension a go. Please note it is a development release, and you should definitely not install it on a production site without first testing it in your development environment.

With this extension you can:

1. Use Magento with your choice of SMTP server, port and authentication/encryption schemes
2. Use Magento with Gmail or Google Apps Email very easily

Please download it and test it out, let me know any feedback you may have.

Update: Thanks to Paulius there is a specially packaged version of the extension that will make it easy to install manually until I can get the Magento Connect version updated (which is still failing). Get it here!

Just a quick little how-to on Mailchimp and Magento using the existing extension by Ebizmarts. We want to be able to send customers who sign up for the newsletter through the Magento store a little thank you gift (discount code) X days after signing up using Mailchimp’s excellent autoresponders. This is supported by Mailchimp, but requires double opt-in or the following little 2 step work-around with the Mailchimp API.
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