Universal Messenger 7.54.0 (EN)

Release 7.54.0 Build 1890 was released in April 2024. This release includes:

Two-Factor Authentication for backoffice access
Functional improvements and optimizations
Update of various components
Support for DB2 discontinued

Support for DB2 discontinued

Support for the DB2 database is officially discontinued with Release 7.54.

Please contact support if you are still using DB2 actively for Universal Messenger!

Two-Factor Authentication for backoffice access

The UM back office now supports Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) via time-based one-time password (TOTP). To generate the corresponding passwords, common mobile apps like 1Password, MS Authenticator, or Google Authenticator can be used.

Using this feature requires that in UM/cmsbs-conf/cmsbs.properties, the login mode is set to either default or internal:

cmsbs.gui.login = "default"

In an existing installation, to activate the feature, simply insert the following line into the file UM/cmsbs-conf/additional.attributes:

include: @de.pinuts.cmsbs.guilogin/totp.attributes

For new installations, the feature is automatically enabled.

Setup is then performed by each individual user through the user menu at the top right.

Functional improvements

General Bounce Handling

The logging of unsubscribes due to too many bounces will now primarily be recorded in the newer table Newsletter activity (newsletter_channel_activity). If this table is not available, logging will occur in the older table Channel Actions (chaction). If neither table is present, unsubscribes will occur without corresponding logging.

Experience has shown that especially when using external email delivery services, the classification of bounces doesn't always work reliably. Occasionally, hard bounces are not recognized as such and are instead reported to UM as soft bounces. A new configuration option now allows controlling that recipients who receive a soft or hard bounce consecutively for each newsletter sent will also be unsubscribed from all lists, even if the configured total number of bounces has not been reached.

The setting:

cmsbs.bounce.newsletter.max_in_a_row = 5

means that recipients will be unsubscribed if they've caused a bounce for the fifth consecutive newsletter.

The following combination of configuration options has proven to be useful in practice:

Mail Delivery / Bounce Handling via SendGrid

Bounces received via webhook are stored in the form of artificially generated bounce emails at the relevant entry in the Mail Inbox table. For research or debugging purposes, all information provided by SendGrid can be viewed here.

If UM receives a "spamreport" event from SendGrid via webhook, the respective recipient will be immediately unsubscribed from all lists.

Mail Delivery / Bounce Handling via Mailjet

Bounces received via webhook are stored in the form of artificially generated bounce emails at the relevant entry in the Mail Inbox table. For research or debugging purposes, all information provided by Mailjet can be viewed here.

Unsubscribes via One-Click-Unsubscribe, received from Mailjet, can now be processed by UM, resulting in immediate unsubscription from all lists.

Core Scripting Engine

A new CSE plugin enables the generation, signing, parsing, and verification of JSON Web Tokens (JWT).

Newsletter Archive

The dropdown for filtering by target segment size has been expanded to include the values 10,000 and 100,000. The selection options of this field may have been overridden on a case-by-case basis by the global configuration option cmsbs.gui.newsarchive.minContacts. In this case, this adjustment does not apply automatically.

In the Recipients section of the newsletter detail view, the date of any potential unsubscription is now listed in the recipient list. This new column is also included in the CSV export.

Mail Delivery

During mail delivery, special situations where the SMTP relay rejects the acceptance of individual emails are now handled better. In these situations, the entire delivery process no longer terminates; instead, a hard bounce is recorded for the respective recipient.

Optimizations

The display of sent emails under tracking in the entry view has been optimized and should now load faster, especially in systems with many entries, and no longer heavily burden the database.

The display of the Web Newsletter Archive App has been optimized so that the listing of newsletters now occurs faster in certain cases.

Due to the removal of the SMS sending function in Release 7.47.0, further optimization could be made during newsletter delivery. This saves various database queries during the sending process.

The analysis of view and click data to detect "bot interactions" now only occurs retrospectively for a maximum of 14 days. This prevents overloading the system immediately after the first activation of the analysis function. This change has no impact on the further use of the function.

In the newsletter archive, the display of newsletters whose delivery is ongoing or has been interrupted due to errors has been optimized.