Dada Mail: Tracker Plugin, Version 6 Preview!

Get a tour of the newly redesigned Tracker Plugin for Dada Mail. Tracker enables you to see analytics attached to your mass mailings. It's quite amazing. Some new features to look out for:


The Tracker plugin has been essentially rewritten, and its features have been expanded. All charts, graphs and maps generated are now interactive and mousing over various parts of the chart/graph/map will reveal additional information. The UI itself has been redesigned, as well.

The new charts/graphs/maps are powered by the Google Visualization API. Data, in the JSON format is created for Dada Mail using the Perl CPAN module, JSON (http://search.cpan.org/~makamaka/JSON/). This module will need to be installed on your hosting platform for these charts/graphs/maps to be created.

Although not part of the standard Perl Library, the module proves to be so useful, that it's usually already installed on many hosting platforms (like LWP, CGI, etc). Dada Mail will be shipped with a copy of this module, although it will be disabled (enabling just means renaming a file and a directory - covered in the Error FAQ)

* Expanded location-based information

As well as country-specific information, Tracker now supports showing information on a city-specific level.

* City Reports by IP Address

Reports are now generated per country, breaking down then by city, and then by individual IP address that may have caused an event, (a message open, clickthrough, forward, archive view) and listed in chronological order.

* Included City Geo IP Data

Dada Mail now comes with both a country Geo IP database, as well as a city-level Geo IP database. The city-level database is fairly large - ~20 megs., but it's utility is worth its size. Geo IP data is provided by http://maxmind.com, who also provide more accurate country/city data, on a subscription.

The distro of Dada Mail is much larger - around 20 megs. compressed, rather than ~7.5 megs for v5 of Dada Mail. This additional size is mostly from the bundled city-level Geo IP database.

Both the city, and country-level Geo IP databases can be found in the,

dada/data

directory.

* An, "open" is recorded, when a, "clickthrough" is recorded when no "open" is previously recorded.

What this means, is this:

Opens are counted when a special embedded image is loaded from the email message you send out. This works well, except when images are not displayed by default by the mail reader, which is often the default for mail readers, or if you're sending out a PlainText message, which does not support embedded images.

To counteract that, Dada Mail supports simply counting a "clickthrough" also as an, "open", if it hasn't also already recorded an open for that specific user, and that specific email message. This is going to lead to a potentially higher - and more accurate open rate in Tracker.