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Geez it’s been a long time coming thanks to Invalid package.xml format errors and duplicate maintainers and goodness-knows-what else. You can finally get the latest version of SMTP Pro – 1.3.4 – even though it’s identical to 1.3. (thank Magento Connect…).

For those who want to install the Magento extension manually (and if you are engineering Magento you probably should) – you can get version 1.3.4 of SMTP Pro here.

If you read my last post on the improvements, you’ll know that it has some great new features for sending, and logging email in Magento using either SMTP or Gmail/Google Apps. So please give it a try and let me know what you think.

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’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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In a bid to help solve a weird 404 error that Kevin has been experiencing with the self test I offered him a pre-release copy of my upcoming ‘unified’ Magento email extension. It will support both SMTP and Google Apps/Gmail along with a few new features.

Anyway, if anyone is keen to try the extension please contact me or flick me an email or post a comment and let me know, I’ll send through the files, I’d rather not post it for public availability here yet, because it’s not as stable as I’d like. But expect it very soon!
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Wow a month since my last blog post, I’ll have to stop calling this a blog and make it a magazine if these blog posts don’t get more frequent huh?! Anyway, I do have something interesting to report from the world of Magento email extensions, particularly my Google Apps/Gmail extension and my SMTP Pro extension are in for a bit of a shake up.
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