Problem with disappearing recipients

[MartinB]

Hi all,

we have a problem with two separate installations of openemm 2011 on CentOS 6:

Our customers register via double opt-in for our newsletter. After completion of the registration they get status "Active" in the recipient view. So far, so good.

Unfortunately after a while, the recipients start to disappear. Not all at once, but they become continually fewer.
They are not only gone from the web-interface, but also deleted from the database.
The recipients disappear without a trace, so we can't even say for sure after what time this happens - we guess it happens after about two to six weeks.

I have checked the logs and found nothing suspicious.
There's no deleting listed in "User log", so it has to happen in another way.

I already searched in the Bugtracker, in the forum and on the web - but came up with nothing.
Now I'm runnning out of ideas and hope someone here has the wisdom to help us solve our problem.

Is there any known problem or functionality than can lead to such behaviour?

Any further ideas where I can look for clues or how to further analyze this?

Thanks!

Kind regards,
Martin

[maschoff]

Do you use any mechanism (cronjob) to clean up the database from time to time?

What do you mean by "disappear"? Are the recipients really removed from customer_1_tbl or are they set to status "bounced"?

To remove recipients via the OpenEMM GUI you either have to delete them one by one or create a target group and use the link "Delete recipients this target".

if nothing helps you should seed your list with a few test addresses and make a daily (or weekly) snapshot of customer_1_tbl to be able get some more details.

Up to now we did not know of such a problem (and we run a lot of OpenEMM instances ourselves).

[MartinB]

Hi maschoff,

thanks for your answer. Seems like you pointed me in the right direction:

The recipients have been deleted completely from the table customer_1_tbl.
We haven't implemented any cleanup-jobs by ourselves - the systems are new and relatively small, so we saw no need for this.

What I have found out:

For subscription we had called form.do and supplied TWO mailinglists (this was an error on our side). Both of these mailinglists exist (we have three mailinglists defined).
So every recipient got status "Waiting for user confirmation" on BOTH mailinglists after registering on our webpage.
After clicking on the activation-link in the e-mail, again both mailinglists are submitted to openEMM (seen in access_openemm.log).
But ONLY THE FIRST mailinglist got changed to "Active" in the database.
The second mailinglist stayed on "Waiting for user confirmation"! Although the second mailinglist got the remarks regarding the Opt-In-IP and date too.

As far as i can see, this was enough for the internal cleanup process to delete the recipients after 30 days (pending.maxRemain.days is set to 30 here).
If I check in the database, the user (luckily we have a few of the customer_ids because of an earlier data-export) is gone from customer_1_tbl. When I check the table customer_1_binding_tbl, the customer_id is still there with the first mailinglist_id (user_status=1), but the entry for the second mailinglist_id is gone.

If I interpret all this correctly, then one mailinglist waiting for confirmation leads to deletion of the recipient by the "pending"-cleanup-process - independent of the existence of other confirmed mailinglists. I doubt this would be the optimal strategy for cleaning up here.

For us here the solution now is simply to remove the second mailinglist - we don't need it and it was only a test.

Thanks a lot for your support!

Kind regards,
Martin

[maschoff]

That sounds very plausible, indeed. We will look into this issue in order to find a way to prevent this unfortunate behaviour in the future.

[maschoff]

Could you please provide the code of the form using two mailing lists so that we can check it out?

[MartinB]

I wanted to attach the file, but I can't find the option to do this. So I'll simply paste the contents of our newsletter.html here.
I have just anonymized the Url for form.do

Code: Select all

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<HTML>
<head>
<title>Newsletter-Anmeldung</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">                                                                                                                  
<style type="text/css">                                                                                                                                                              
<!--                                                                                                                                                                                 
body, table { font-family: Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; }                                                                                                         
h1 { font-family: Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; }                                                                                                                  
select, input { font-family: Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;}                                                                                                        
select { width: 200px; }                                                                                                                                                             
-->                                                                                                                                                                                  
</style>                                                                                                                                                                             
</head>                                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                                                     
<body bgcolor="#C0C0C0" link="#bb2233" vlink="#bb2233" alink="#bb2233">                                                                                                              
<table width="480" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0">                                                                                                        
  <tr bgcolor="#808080">
    <td bgcolor="#808080">
      <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
        <tr>
          <td>
          <form action="http://emm.XXX.de/form.do" accept-encoding="UTF-8">
          <input type="hidden" name="agnCI" value="1">
          <input type="hidden" name="agnFN" value="de_doi_confirm">
          <input type="hidden" name="agnSUBSCRIBE" value="1">
          <input type="hidden" name="agnMAILINGLIST" value="1">
          <input type="hidden" name="agnSUBSCRIBE2" value="1">
          <input type="hidden" name="agnMAILINGLIST2" value="3">          
          <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
            <tr>
              <td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td>
            </tr>            
            <tr>
              <td width="10">&nbsp;</td>
              <td><h1>NEWSLETTER ANMELDUNG</h1>
                  <p>vielen Dank f&uuml;r Ihr Interesse an unserem Angebot.<br>
                  Hier k&ouml;nnen Sie sich zum Newsletter registrieren:</p>
                  <table border=0>
                  <tr><td width="120">Anrede:</td>
                      <td><select name="GENDER">
                            <option value="2" selected>unbekannt</option>
                            <option value="1">Frau</option>
                            <option value="0">Herr</option>
                          </select></td></tr>
                  <tr><td>Titel:</td>
                      <td><input type="text" name="TITLE" style="width: 200px;"></td></tr>  
                  <tr><td>Vorname:</td>
                      <td><input type="text" name="FIRSTNAME" style="width: 200px;"></td></tr>
                  <tr><td>Nachname:</td>
                      <td><input type="text" name="LASTNAME" style="width: 200px;"></td></tr>
                  <tr><td>E-Mail-Adresse:</td>
                      <td><input type="text" name="EMAIL" style="width: 200px;"></td></tr>
                  <tr><td>Organisation:</td>
                      <td><input type="text" name="orga" style="width: 200px;"></td></tr>
                  <tr><td>PLZ:</td>
                      <td><input type="text" name="plz" style="width: 50px;"></td></tr>
                  <tr><td>Ort:</td>
                      <td><input type="text" name="ort" style="width: 200px;"></td></tr>        
                  <tr><td valign="top">Newsletterformat:</td>
                      <td><input type="radio" name="MAILTYPE" value="1" checked>HTML (mit Bildern)<br>
                          <input type="radio" name="MAILTYPE" value="0">Text (Plaintext)</td></tr>
                  <tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td></tr>
                  <tr><td><input type="submit" value="Absenden"></td>
                      <td><input type="reset" value="Abbrechen" onClick="javascript:history.back();"></td></tr>
                  </table>         
                  </td>                                 
              <td width="10">&nbsp;</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td>
            </tr>            
          </table>
          </form>
          </td>
        </tr>
      </table>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

[maschoff]

We may have a ScriptAction solution for you. If so, we will post it here. Stay tuned!

[Hofmann M.]

Hello MartinB,

you send the DOI-Mail at the Mailinglist ID 1.
If a user click the activation-link you want to subscribe him to the mailinglist ids 1 and 3.

Solution to subscribe at the second mailinglist (id 3):

Add two new steps at your Action "DOI confirm" with the Step "Double-opt-in confirmation".

Step exists: Double-opt-in confirmation
Step new 1: Load recipient-data
Step new 2: Script-action

The Script for "Script-action":

Code: Select all

## add to second mailinglist
$BindingEntry.setMailinglistID(3)
$BindingEntry.setCustomerID($customerID)

#if($BindingEntry.getUserBindingFromDB(1) == true)
   #if($BindingEntry.getUserStatus() == 5)
        $BindingEntry.setUserStatus(1)
        $BindingEntry.updateStatusInDB(1)
   #end
#end

Attention: This will only activate the userstatus for users with a "wait-for-confirmation"-Status (Userstatus = 5)!

Best regards
Markus