Installations and Migrations

Email Marketer Installation Guide

System Requirements

Make sure that your system meets the server requirements. The easiest way to check that your server meets our software’s requirements is to upload our check_iem.php script to your server’s base website directory, and load it in your browser. If you see “NOT OK” in red on that page, please troubleshoot the issue with your webhost until everything says “OK” or “Unknown”.

Uploading Files

Download Email Marketer from the purchase link that was emailed to you. Unzip the Interspire Email Marketer package onto your local hard drive. Using an FTP program (such as Filezilla, which is free), login to your web server and upload the email marketer folder into your base website directory. This directory is commonly called public_html, html, www, or website_html. If you’re not sure what it is, your webhost will be able to tell you.

MySQL Database

Interspire Email Marketer makes use of a MySQL database to store your data. This database must be created before you run the Interspire Email Marketer installation wizard. Your database user account should also have full grant access (all privileges) to that database. You will need the database connection details during the setup wizard. Setting up your database may differ with your webhost and what software they use for your webhosting control panel.

Setup Wizard

Interspire Email Marketer includes a simple one step installation process.

To start the setup wizard, navigate to the directory that you uploaded Interspire Email Marketer to, for example: http://www.yoursite.com/iem/. The Interspire Email Marketer setup wizard will appear. It contains the following fields:

• License Key – Copy the license key you received when you purchased Interspire Email Marketer and paste it here.
• Application URL – This is the URL to your Interspire Email Marketer installation (not your main website if this is in a sub folder)
• Email Address – This is the email that will be used for the super admin user that will be created, also it will be the default contact email which can be changed later via your settings page.
• Password & Confirm Password – This will become the password for your admin user. The username will be “admin”.
• Database Information – You will need your database username, password, database name and host (usually “localhost”, though this may vary with some hosts).
• Send Server Configuration – This will send information about your server back to us. The data sent will be basic information such as your PHP version, MySQL version, etc. No information that can identify you or your website will be sent, it is completely anonymous. This will aid us in future development to know what versions of PHP and MySQL we can support amongst other things.

Your Interspire Email Marketer configuration details will now be saved into the /admin/includes/config.php file. Your database tables will also been created.

Congratulations, you are now ready to login to the Interspire Email Marketer control panel and start on your first email campaign! Your control panel will be accessible by adding “/admin” onto the end of your website URL.

Setting up Email Marketer

Now that you have successfully installed Email Marketer, here are some setup tips to get the best performance and reliability out of the software:

1. Enter your SMTP server details (/Settings/Email Settings) – if you do not have an SMTP server, we recommend contacting your hosting provider or contact us and we can provide you some recommendations. The default mail settings are used primarily for diagnostics and testing and may end up resulting in partial sends or general poor deliverability.
2. Set up cron on your server (/Settings/Cron Settings) – your webhost should be able to help with setting a cron job on your server.
3. Set up bounce processing (/Settings/Bounce Settings).

Setting these things up will help you get the best performance out of your Email Marketer.

You can also reference our Ubuntu specific installation guide or consult the guide geared towards a cPanel-based installation

Troubleshooting tips

If you are getting an error message about files/folders needing to have write permissions, you will need to adjust the permissions on your server. If you are using a Linux server, this can be done via FTP. Using Filezilla for example, navigate to the file and right click it. Choose File Permissions and set the permissions as follows:

Files, set to 664:

• /admin/includes/config.php

Note: Although it says 664, some webhosts may require 666 instead.

Folders, set to 775:

• /admin/temp/
• /admin/com/storage

Note: Although it says 775, some webhosts may require 777 instead.

If you have any issues, and you have already run check_iem.php to ensure that your server meets our software’s requirements, please open a support ticket.

Migration Guide

How do I migrate Interspire Email Marketer from one server to another?

Migrating from one server to another is a relatively simple process.

Before you get started, make sure the new server meets our software’s requirements by downloading our check_iem.php script, uploading it to your server, and loading it in your browser. If anything is listed as NOT OK, troubleshoot this with your web hosting provider.

To begin the migration, export your Interspire Email Marketer database. To do that, you’ll need access to a database tool such as PHPMyAdmin or Adminer. You should be able to get this information by contacting your web hosting provider and either asking them to provide you with a database tool, or for them to provide you with the backup file.

Once the backup is complete you can copy your existing Interspire Email Marketer files from your current server over to the new server. Then you’ll need to import the database that you backed up from your existing server to the new one. You can do this also by using a tool such as PHPMyAdmin or by contacting the web hosting provider of the new server.

Finally, edit the configuration file located in /admin/includes/config.php so that it contains the information for your new server. (Database server name, database user, database password, new license key if your domain has changed — you’ll need to contact us to regenerate a license key for you — new application URL if changed, new server time if changed).

Once this is done you can then login to Interspire Email Marketer using your old user name and password. Remember to remove your old installation from your old server and to remove any cron jobs that you may have had set up.

If you are changing URLs, and have recently sent out email campaigns where you want the links to still work and track properly, then place a .htaccess file (for Apache web servers) on the old server in the Email Marketer folder like the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/emailmarketer/$1 [R=301,L]

This will redirect all requests for Email Marketer links to the new domain, so links and open rate continue to work. This .htaccess file may need additional modification depending on your server environment and setup. Please contact your web hosting provider if you need help troubleshooting.

How can I change the folder/path that Interspire Email Marketer resides in?

There is one important thing to note before you do this: All unsubscribe and confirmation links as well as links to forms in previous emails you have sent out will no longer work. Also, if you’ve used link tracking, none of the links in the emails you have previously sent out will work any more either. This is because the links in the emails still point to the old URL and, if you change it, the links will be broken.

If this is OK, then you can change the folder IEM is in simply by renaming the folder and editing the /admin/includes/config.php file. Change the value of SENDSTUDIO_APPLICATION_URL in this file to reflect the new path.

Overcoming file size limits when uploading SQL files to phpMyAdmin

If you find that you are unable to upload your backed-up SQL file to phpMyAdmin because the file is too large (even after zipping it), there are four options you could try:

Using a better compression algorithm

Zip is fairly good but there are better alternatives. GZip and BZip2 are good choices that should give you considerably lower file sizes (and phpMyAdmin understands them too). If you need a utility that can compress to gzip or bzip, you could try 7zip.

Increasing the maximum file size phpMyAdmin will accept

If the limitation you are running into is a limit on the size of file uploads on your system, you may be able to increase this limit. By default it’s usually 2M or 8M. To increase it you need to change PHP settings. You can change these settings either system-wide (if you have permission) or locally. The settings to change (with their typical defaults are):

post_max_size = 8M
upload_max_filesize = 8M

You must ensure that post_max_size is the same or larger than upload_max_filesize. These settings can be changed globally by changing them in your php.ini file (its location varies depending on your system). After changing the settings, remember to restart your web server. You may be able to change these settings locally if you’re using Apache by putting a .htaccess file in phpMyAdmin’s directory. The contents of the file should be:

php_value post_max_size 20M
php_value upload_max_filesize 20M

Change “20M” to however large you want it to be. You shouldn’t need to restart the web server for these changes to take effect, but if you start getting Internal Server Errors (500) then this probably means your host does not allow you to change these settings and you need to remove those settings.

Splitting up the file

This is quite tricky, but you could split the file into smaller pieces, compress each piece, and then load them in one after the other. You may need to be familiar with SQL to do this safely, and editing large files can be problematic depending on your system speed and text editor.

Importing the SQL file another way

If you have SSH access to it then you can use the mysqlcommand line program to import the file like so:
mysql -u myuser -p mydatabase < myfile.sql

This will prompt you for the password for myuser and then import the SQL from myfile.sql. Obviously you will need to have uploaded myfile.sql through FTP or similar. Ideally you would compress myfile.sql, upload it, uncompress it and then import using the command above.

I changed my MySQL login details. How do I update Interspire Email Marketer so that it will use the new details?

If you are running Interspire Email Marketer you can simply edit the /admin/includes/config.php file to update your your MySQL connection details to your new ones.

My MySQL runs on a custom port. How do I specify that in Interspire Email Marketer?

You can specify a custom port for your MySQL server by adding it to the end of the server name localhost:3306

If you encountered error message such as this (when you are installing/migrating) using MySQL:

There was a problem running the following queries against your database: CREATE TABLE ss_autoresponders ( autoresponderid int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, name varchar(255) default NULL, subject varchar(255) default NULL, format char(1) default NULL, textbody longtext, htmlbody longtext, createdate int(11) default 0, active int default 0 references ss_users(userid), hoursaftersubscription int(11) default 0, ownerid int(11) NOT NULL default 0 references ss_users(userid), searchcriteria mediumtext, listid int(11) default 0 references ss_lists(listid), tracklinks char(1) default 1, trackopens char(1) default 1, multipart char(1) default 1, queueid int(11) default 0, sendfromname varchar(255) default NULL, sendfromemail varchar(255) default NULL, replytoemail varchar(255) default NULL, bounceemail varchar(255) default NULL, charset varchar(255) default NULL, embedimages char(1) default '0', to_firstname int default 0 references ss_customfields(fieldid), to_lastname int default 0 references ss_customfields(fieldid), autorespondersize int default 0 ) character set utf8 engine=innodb
Two of the most prominent reasons are as follow:

• MySQL user account that Interspire Email Marketer is using does not have the permission to create table >> You need to grant Interspire Email Marketer full access to the database that is going to be used by Interspire Email Marketer
• innoDB is disabled in MySQL >> You need to enable innoDB for MySQL