Mail list management application?

[lin robinson]

There has to be a program or app for this.

I activated a mailing program on my site, fine. And I have some names to mail to. And after a roll-out in August should end up getting a lot more. So fine.

What I'm thinking is... how can I take incoming emails and zap them into some for of program or dB that will be recognized by a mailer program?

I don't want to mail back on the mail server they came in on...I want to go down the list one by one, not gang addesses. Which is why I put in the phpmail program.

But I end up screwing around trying to convert an old stack of address/emails in a text file and a bunch of incoming mail moved to a local folder into something a free-standing mail program can process.

Hope that makes sense.

[bumfluff]

Couple of questions..

What's the 'email program' you have on your site? Is it for managing emails, or is it an email form script or something?

Also, I get the bit about you wanting to send email using PHPMail, but not the part just before that where you're saying what you don't want to do..

As I understood it, or possibly misunderstood it, your situation is something like: you've got PHPMail installed to handle how you send outgoing email. Now you want some way to automatically add addresses (from incoming emails) to a list that PHPMail can use to send out multiple emails (eg, a newsletter). Is that anywhere near right?

[TWD-Tony]

I'd be very carefull doing this - what you are effectively doing is harvesting email addresses from your incoming emails... What you should be doing is setting up a newsletter subscribe system. That way people can actively subscribe to your newletter and you won't be accused of spamming.

There are plenty of free email newsletter management systems available, phplist is the one that springs to mind off the top of my head.

[lin robinson]

That's the picture, bumfluff. What I "didn't want to do" is send mails with muliple addressees, as yahoo or hotmail would do.

Thanks tony, I'll look into that. I have two reasons for wanting to do this, by the way (and am NOT going to have a newsletter...I'm SO sick of those, blogs too)
One is to notify purchasers of a new version.

The other is to let people who asked to be informed when a new product is ready that they can see it now.

By the way... my definition of "spamming" does not include mailing people who bought a product with information on that or similar products.
I'd reserve that word for things like selling the address or using it so pimp unrelated stuff.
This is a word that is MUCH overused and too widely applied these days.

Thanks a lot for the tip.

[TWD-Tony]

By the way... my definition of "spamming" does not include mailing people who bought a product with information on that or similar products.

Sorry - you didn't say that the email address you wanted to use were from people who bought your product(s) - you just said you wanted to use incoming email address (sorry I mis-understood).
How do you sell this product? Do you use any ecommerce type software to take payments and keep track of orders etc... If you do then the ecommerce software should have the ability to keep people's email addresses and send out updates / mailshots.

BUT - by by definition SPAM is any unsolicited email to a personal email address, even if that someone has bought a product from you - technically you still need them to "opt in" to recieve updates etc and you certainly need an "opt out" link in any emails you send

[bumfluff]

I haven't used php mail but I've had a quick look at some stuff online. From what I can see, it's not really built to do bulk mailing.

Having said that, you could probably use it for mailshots but it'd mean a bit of work. Typical useage would be:

<?php $to = "someone@example.com";
$subject = "Test mail";
$message = "Hello! This is a simple email message.";
$from = "someonelse@example.com";
$headers = "From: $from";
mail($to,$subject,$message,$headers);
echo "Mail Sent."; ?>

So.. presumably with a list of contact addresses in a database, you could do a fairly simple text email newsletter (I don't know if you could do a html one with it). You could write a php script that asked you to enter the unchanging fields and saved them as strings ($subject, $message, $headers) and then pulled the $to field details from the database, looping through til it was done