divydovy

Just another human

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WordPress XPertMailer Fails to Send to Gmail SMTP on Local WAMP Install

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I can’t begin to tell you how frustrating this one was.

So, local WAMP install on Vista 32bit. Using XpertMailer plugin to use Gmail as SMTP host for outgoing WordPress emails. Something I’ve done with no problem on my VPS.

On my local machine, I just couldn’t get the XpertMailer plugin past the submission ‘Loading…’ dialogue.

I made sure I could telnet to smtp.gmail.com on the right ports (465/587). I tried everything. Everything! Except making sure that the Open_SSL PHP extension was enabled in WAMP. This post made me think to check: http://www.vishalkumar.in/2009/06/php-mail-using-gmail-smtp-tutorial/

As soon as I enabled it, everything worked perfectly 🙂

Posting this because I didn’t find the answer using any of my initial search terms. Hope it helps someone.

Send Email to Gmail Groups – Why no UK support?

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I’ve read a couple of posts online about how to send email to contact groups in Gmail. Apparently this is quite possible in Australia and the US (or at least it was at some point). Why can’t we do it in the UK? Don’t you trust us Google?

If somone sends me a funny that I want to send on to my friends, I have to copy the message, go to my contacts, find the group, select to email them, then paste the email/attachments in and send. It would be nice to be able to click ‘forward’, type the group name and go.

Would love to know any quick ways to do this, or any idea from the Gmail team as to when and if this is coming to the UK?

*UPDATE 11/02/09*

W00t! It just worked for me – thanks Gmail team!

*UPDATE 09/03/09*

Gah! It’s stopped working again now. I’m not sure whether I’m trying to do it differently this time, or whether they’ve taken support away again – I’ll keep looking and post if I find anything.

*UDPATE 01/03/10*

OK – so it seems to me some kind of intermittent problem. On dodgy connections, I often find that the group send functionality isn’t available. But, if I sign out and back in, it reappears. Perhaps it’s a JavaScript issue. Either way, a good old sign out/in seems to be the fix.

Digsby Failed to Connect to Gmail

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Just a quick one really. Restarted my computer after some standard Windows Update installs and since I started my computer today my Digsby won’t connect to Gmail.

It had trouble connnecting to twitter too, but got there in the end.

From the Digsby forums it looks like a restart might solve the problem. I’ll post back if it does.

UPDATE

Digsby announcement – it’s gmail’s servers apparently. Looking forward to getting the update.

UPDATE 9th Jan 09

I thought I’d updated this post :S Digsby update came out quickly, worked great – well done Digsby.