MailDrop: Free Upgrades
Posted October 4th, 2004 @ 09:14am by Erik J. Barzeski
MailDrop 2.0 will be shipping in early November. As this is FSS's first "2.0," we're going to do it right: anyone who purchases MailDrop 1.3.3 between now and the release of MailDrop 2.0 will receive MailDrop 2.0 at no additional cost. In other words, a free upgrade.
MailDrop 1.3.3 costs $59. MailDrop 2.0 will cost $79, and upgrades for existing MailDrop 1.x customers will be $20. We may run introductory pricing for a week or so (no less than the current price of $59), but I can't guarantee that just yet: if you want MailDrop, now's the time to get it.
MailDrop 2.0 is going to add a significant feature set, including unlimited custom variables, timed mailings, ODBC import of recipients, multipart/mime messages, threading, sending through a recipient's SMTP server, and more.
MailDrop 1.0 was our first major project, and we've learned quite a bit. Some of the code from 1.x has survived, but MailDrop 2.0 is a near-complete rewrite using bindings, an SQLite database, and the much-improved DataCrux to bridge the two.
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Posted 05 Oct 2004 at 5:43am #
It would be better if you included a link to the MailDrop app page. For example: MailDrop
Posted 05 Oct 2004 at 7:46am #
Okay, I edited the entry. How's that? 🙂
Posted 05 Oct 2004 at 8:53am #
Will your experience w/ DataCrux' stuff for SQLite flow into PulpFiction, eventually? Or are the requirements for PF too different from MailDrop's?
Posted 05 Oct 2004 at 9:02am #
DataCrux is not suitable for PulpFiction at all. It'd slow just about everything down.
Posted 05 Oct 2004 at 9:34pm #
As a defense for DataCrux, the problem is that PulpFiction uses multiple threads for writing to and reading from the database at the same time. DC is fine as long as you're not heavily multithreaded.
Posted 09 Oct 2004 at 12:11am #
In defense of my own framework 🙂 and to clarify what Erik said, DataCrux was designed as a covenient way to map objects to a SQLite database without having to work about SQL. It does so by dynamically generating most of the query strings at runtime basic on the situation. This makes it easy to plug in most projects. But like everything, covenience comes at the price of raw speed. In most cases, the difference isn't a problem.
But just by the nature of the problem it sets out to solve, PulpFiction is so incredibly demanding of SQLite that it just wouldn't make sense to put DataCrux between them. PF's best bet is to talk directly to sqlite with mostly predefined query strings. This means more work for the developer working on PF, but it's work that has to be done until we all have 4GHz G5s. Andy's comments are correct too.
Posted 25 Oct 2004 at 12:43pm #
Do you have a complete feature set finalized for MailDrop 2.0 ?
Is it going to handle bounces and/or unsubscribes?
Thanks
Posted 25 Oct 2004 at 12:57pm #
Depends on what you mean by that. Even 1.3.x "handles" it by scrubbing.
Posted 26 Oct 2004 at 9:12pm #
I also would like to know if there is a full feature set for MailDrop 2available for viewing. I would also like to know if you will be able to connect to a remote sql database.
Posted 26 Oct 2004 at 9:16pm #
It's not available for viewing, and yes, you can connect to a remote SQL database through ODBC. If you have more questions, email us and we can give you more detailed answers!