writing a newsletter program in php?

[Mark C]

Hi,

I'm new to php (ok new, try 3 days ;), althought, I'm finding it fun, I
'm trying to think of a project to do, to get me more into it.

And after having a discussion with a friend and also setting up several
Mailman mailing lists for people that want to compose HTML mails and
post them as newsletters, it got me thinking, would I be able to create
a similar program to mailman in php?

So admins just login to the list. copy and past the html into a text box
and php then renders it for a preview, then if they like it, they click
send, this send queries the database and sends it to all the people list
to receive mail on that list.

I would assume that the sending could be handed off somehow to
sendmail/postfix?

The list front end would also hold list preferances as well, for
subscribers and admins,
basically I want to mimik Mailman, but in php and be able to render
previews of mails first, basically it will be a newsletter program,
rather than a mailing list one, which is where Mailman falls over.

Cheers

Mark

--
To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism;
to steal from many is research.

[Manuel Lemos]

Hello,

On 01/22/2003 08:15 PM, Mark C wrote:
> I'm new to php (ok new, try 3 days ;), althought, I'm finding it fun, I
> 'm trying to think of a project to do, to get me more into it.
>
> And after having a discussion with a friend and also setting up several
> Mailman mailing lists for people that want to compose HTML mails and
> post them as newsletters, it got me thinking, would I be able to create
> a similar program to mailman in php?
>
> So admins just login to the list. copy and past the html into a text box
> and php then renders it for a preview, then if they like it, they click
> send, this send queries the database and sends it to all the people list
> to receive mail on that list.
>
> I would assume that the sending could be handed off somehow to
> sendmail/postfix?

Yes, but you are recommend to set sendmail with the appropriate queuing
flags so it does not stall your PHP script while attempting to deliver
to every subscribers and instead just queue the messages without delay.

In that case you may want to try this class for composing and sending
messages, that has a sub-class for sending using sendmail program
directly. It already comes with options that let you tell to just queue
the messages without delay as needed.

http://www.phpclasses.org/mimemessage

> The list front end would also hold list preferances as well, for
> subscribers and admins,
> basically I want to mimik Mailman, but in php and be able to render
> previews of mails first, basically it will be a newsletter program,
> rather than a mailing list one, which is where Mailman falls over.

Yes, but keep in mind that besides composing and sending messages, you
also have to take care of creating subscriber records, validating
subscriber addresses, handling bounces, handling unsubscriptions, etc...
and dedicating mailing list manager programs already do that.

--

Regards,
Manuel Lemos

[Justin French]

Yes, this is a reasonable candidate for a PHP project, however:

1. why reinvent the wheel?

2. There are some serious issues with using PHP's mail() command:

a) large mailing lists will time out on individual emails

b) the alternative to a is to use Bcc. Your ISP will probably set the
maximum to 100 emails in a Bcc, which throws that idea out the window

c) the alternative to a and b seems to be injecting emails directly into the
mail que with sendmail, and all sorts of stuff I haven't looked into yet.

There is a class (not not a tutorial, a class in OOP way) on phpclasses.org
which offers (what seems to be) every answer to the above issues, but I've
never used it, and it's OOP nature may be a complex way to get into PHP.

There are literally 100's of threads about mailing lists in the archives.

Justin