About DaveBerard

As a quick update, Constant Contact no longer supports or works on Windows XP.  The change mentioned by Shannon for TLS 1.0 and SSL v3 mean that there are no supported SSL security protocols left on Windows XP that comply with the security standards of Constant Contact.  Microsoft has not and will not release any updates to XP to resolve this issue. ... View more

Great question.  Tags are very new to Constant Contact.  In fact, not all of our customers even have them yet as we are not finished migrating our customers to our new Contact Management platform.  As such, not all of our products are able to expose tags to customers since not all customers have them available to them.    As we are finishing up migrating accounts we are planning to release these new Contact Management features to products available to all customers, such as the API.  Will definitely pass along that feedback about the Join My Mailing List to that team.  I'm not sure what their plans are but will update with any feedback I get and am able to share. ... View more

Hi Ian,   Great suggestion.  Unfortunately, at this time we don't have the ability to tag contacts through either the basic Join My Mailing List forms in your account or through the API in custom signup form solutions.  We are planning on adding tags to the API over the summer and you should see updates to the API with that functionality on our release notes.  At this point, we do not have plans to add that to the Join My Mailing List forms but I will pass that feedback on.   Just to make sure what the API means is that you would need to code in a server side language, such as PHP, a custom signup form using our API directly and it would not be as simple as form parameters.  If this solution doesn't sound like something you'd be comfortable using, you're best option is to wait to see if this is added to our Join My Mailing List app. ... View more

We would need to work with Convio development team to troubleshoot this.  Without knowing what the call was, will be hard to track this down and get more information.  Any chance you can open a ticket with them and connect us with their team?  Our direct email address for API support is apisupport@constantcontact.com. ... View more

Posted a response on some of your other posts.  This is not related to the original topic but we did mention this defect in our May release notes: http://developer.constantcontact.com/docs/release-notes/may-2014-rel-notes.html.  We are working on fixing this defect now and hope to have it in a future release. ... View more

Looks like there is some sort of confusion here.  When I copy/paste your JSON into the same validator, it passes for me.  Looks like something must be changing when you post your JSON in the forums editor.  Can you save the bad JSON into a file and either link it here or send it to us directly at webservices@constantcontact.com.       ... View more

The first error you are receiving is returned if you have an invalid accept header.  If the accept header is provided, it must be application/json.  If you provide a different value for Accept, you'd receive a 415 unsupported content type error.   The second error from the validator doesn't look like it's related.  I put your JSON posted through a validator and it ran fine.  Also, it passes our Schema.  Are you sure you are setting the correct Accept header in your calls? ... View more

I tested your JSON Payload against my account and was able to create a list no problem with the content you're sending over.  I assume you're using the POST request to create a contact list?  Here is what I received:   ... View more

That's a great question.  I checked with our billing team to see if that's available in our product and they let me know that it is not available today.  Our typical customer doesn't change very drastically throughout a month or even month to month (usual profile is slow, steady growth over time) and doesn't have generally have a max count that differs from their current Active count, so this is not a feature that our typical customer has requested before.   I can see why it would be interesting in your case as you have a highly volatile active list.  We don't currently support sharing that number out but I will bring the feature back to the team and see if this is something we can prioritize in the future.  In full transparency, as this is not something our typical customer runs into it will be a lower priority item unless we start to see higher volume of feedback so I would be remiss if I said it was something we would be getting to soon. ... View more

Great question and very important one that I should have clarified.  Each bill is determined by the peak number of active contacts in the previous month.  Removed contacts are not used in that calculation with the exception being they were active at some point in time during the previous month.  ... View more

Contacts are never deleted in our system, including in the UI.  The "Delete" function of the UI simply marks them to not display.  You can still export them and the history of their sends continues to exist.   Because the API needs to be able to access these Contacts to update, retrieve information and be associated to reporting information, we provide them all through a status filter of "Removed" as you saw.  There is no way to permanently delete Contacts in the API as there is no way to delete them permanently in Constant Contact.   By deleting a list, or using the Bulk Activity to clear a list, you will automatically move your Contacts to a "Removed" state if they are not on any additional lists.  If you are basically just automating clearing a list and adding new contacts to a list, I would highly recommend using our bulk API functions to do this.  It is very simple to do the following pseudo-algorithm:   1. Create a Clear Contacts from List Activity: http://developer.constantcontact.com/docs/bulk_activities_api/bulk-activities-clear-contactlists.html 2. Create an Import Contacts Activity with up to 20,000 Contacts or 4MB of data: http://developer.constantcontact.com/docs/bulk_activities_api/bulk-activities-addcontact-multipart.html 3. Repeat step 2 if over 20,000k Contacts or 4MB of data until all Contacts are imported http://developer.constantcontact.com/docs/bulk_activities_api/bulk-activities-addcontact-multipart.html   All bulk activities are processes serially in the order they were created.  So, you can actually simply create all these activities and poll until they all complete to ensure that the process worked correctly.  Hope this helps! ... View more

Is this a question about one of our editors?  If so, this is expected behavior.  Our visual editors do not support any characters outside of the ASCII-8601-1 character set and will convert many characters to the closest relative in the character set we do support.  If you are looking to get support on that or provide feedback, I would suggest contacting our support staff as this is not an API problem (this is a developer support forum for our API) but how our web UI works. ... View more

Thanks.  Sent this over to the API support staff to take a look at.  We don't have much expertise with that Wordpress module in house, we generally recommend using our PHP wrapper library for PHP development as it eliminates any 3rd party issues and can be fully supported.  Team is going to see if they can trouble shoot this though.  ... View more

Can you provide the code you're using and PM us or email us your API key you're using in the request?  We would need more information to dig into this.  The error message shown indicates that the request had an invalid API key and wasn't actually processed by our servers, it was caught and blocked by our API management proxy (hosted by Mashery).  Either you're sending multiple requests, one that doesn't have all the valid information you need, and the valid request is being processed correctly or something very unexpected is going on.  Either way, we'd need a code sample and your developer information. ... View more

If you're only looking to add new Contacts and never update existing ones, you can just leave the else block out entirely.  This code is in here assuming that if a Contact subscribes to the list through whatever flow you have, you want to make sure that the contact is added to that list (in addition to any other lists they may be on already).  That's the only thing this code does and can easily be left out.    A best practice recommendation is that if the Contact is interacting with you directly, you message them that they are already on the list though if you aren't planning on updating them and giving them a success message.  If the Contact isn't interacting directly with your app, this isn't really important. ... View more

I did take a look at our service logs.  We had an issue with some of our servers from late July 23rd to early July 24th which caused a slight rise in 500 errors.  The 500 errors were intermittent and should be resolved.  Let me know if you see any more happening today. ... View more

We restart our servers periodically when doing software updates or when we take servers in and out of our active pools and for standard maintenance.  This specific thread had to do with an issue where some of our production servers had become unresponsive back in 2012, this is not currently the case as all of our servers are up, live and healthy.  There is no way customers like yourself would be able to restart our services.   500 errors can come up for many reasons, especially with our v1 XML API.  Typically, it's caused by XML that is incorrectly formed or has invalid characters that can cause our XML parser to throw an unhandled exception, thus the 500 Server Error instead of a valid error message.  It's usually best for you to provide a code sample and/or your XML payload which is causing the error for us to give you more support.  ... View more

Thanks for the feedback Laurie.  Definitely something we're looking to add in the future, but it is unlikely to be something we are adding in 2012.  We are working on some other really big features and enhancements that you'll see rolled out throughout the year and we just don't have the bandwidth to hit on all of those features plus this. ... View more

At this time we still do not offer this as a basic feature of our product.  Unfortunately, this is not something we are likely to see this year. ... View more

Sorry but we still do not offer a date based autoresponder.  This method is still the best option for implementing it.  ... View more

The normal way of handling this is to have a central server endpoint (or agent) that handles all requests and then sends it back to the correct client.  Since you can pass optional parameters to the server and the server will pass them back to you, you can tell which endpoint to redirect the information to.  Then your client will receive the update from your server agent and this flow will correctly work. ... View more

There is an option that could be done using our API features (some of our partners and customers have done this already).  Using our Email Campaigns API and our Email Scheduling API (limited access, please DM for more information), you can create an integration that provides this functionality.  The flow would end up being something like this:   1. Create a custom HTML/XHTML "birthday" template using your favorite HTML design tool (make sure to test it out through the Email product to see how it looks in various email clients) 2. Use the API to create a "birthday" list - most of our customers do a monthly birthday email and not daily to keep reporting and flow simple, but that's up to you and your customer 3. Create a campaign using the HTML/XHTML you used in step one and associate it with the list you created in step 2 using the API 4. Schedule the email to be sent out on the correct date for your birthday emails (limited access API, DM me for more information)   This flow would emmulate a birthday auto-responder type feature.  This flow assumes you have the ability to filter your customers contacts based on a birthday that is stored somewhere.  Hope this helps.     ... View more

Status field of a Contact is read-only and is not able to be modified.  That said, this should not result in a 401 error.    If you're looking to move a Contact to Do Not Mail, you would need to execute a Delete request (http://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Documentation/Opting-out-a-Contact/ba-p/25117) on the Contact URI.  This will change their status from Active to Do Not Mail.   The 401 response is only returned if there is a failure in authentication in some way.  This could include an invalid API key, invalid API key/username format or an actual bad username and/or password combination.  I would recommend taking VB out of the equation and trying to send a request manually through an open source RESTClient (such as: http://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Documentation/How-To-Use-RESTClient/ba-p/24915) to see if you can make the request work with just a simple tool.  Once you have everything working correctly there, it is usually pretty easy to see where in a code flow the problem is failing. ... View more

Looks like the problem is your list ID being invalid.  List ID values start at 1 and increment as you create more lists.  0 would always be an invalid List ID number so it should be correctly returning a 400 Bad Request response.   For more information on retreiving list IDs, please see this overview: http://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Documentation/Retrieving-a-Contact-List-Collection/ba-p/25067 ... View more

You got it exactly Kristi!  There are some RESTful webservices that interpret PUT as "Update or create if resource doesn't exist".  Our API is more literal in that a POST request is a create (and must be done on the Collection) and a PUT request is an update (and must be done on the individual resource you are updating).  This is because we do create a unique internal ID value for every Contact and thus a PUT request to update or create doesn't make sense in our API.  You should be all set if you change the request type to POST for the creation.   Hope this explains it and gets you going! ... View more