Posted by drm on January 26, 2008 at 12:36am
I want to drop a paid service I have on my website and implement a sign-up function so that visitors, who generally will not be registered users, can sign up for an email list so that we can send them occasional news updates. It needs to have proper double opt-in capability. I looked on drupal.org and found mailman manager, notify, and simple news. The last seemed to be closest to what I'm looking for. Does anybody have experience with these? Thanks ahead.
Comments
Third party tool
I found them all a bit lacking, especially in terms of composition and tracking. Plus you have deliverability issues and run the risk of your server IP being blacklisted. We're using MailChimp, and I have a rudimentary module written to integrate with it. Basically, a checkbox in a user's profile will subscribe to a given list, and a sign up form for anonymous users which also uses the API. I'm happy to share, although it's rough at this point.
Lev
Lev Tsypin
ThinkShout, Inc.
thinkshout.com | twitter.com/levelos
I'd like to see it
Lev,
I'd like to see your module, particularly for anonymous users. I'd prefer not to start from scratch on this. If there is a particular weakness with it, maybe I could help smooth it out for you. I assume you can send it via a pm?
Dean
Lists module
What I've done is run my own MailMan mailing lists and use a customized version of the Lists module that's running at http://drupal.org/lists
The Lists module works for anonymous and logged-in users and it offloads the mailing list confirmation to MailMan.
Use civicrm for this?
I see now that Civicrm says it supports email distributions to emails in its database, and that it includes a sign-up form and link on the website. Have folks used civicrm and found that it works well, including this function?
CiviMail, Simplenews..
Hi all,
I use civimail for mass email on http://www.pdxpeace.org using the SMTP service of uas.coop. It's working great right now after a long struggle to get it setup in my less than ideal shared hosting environment. You might check on the CiviMail's required php modules, to see if you can even get it running, because it's not simple, but it's very powerful, and ideal if you want to record complex relationships, track email opens and clicks, etc.
CiviMail does not expose the sent newsletter as a drupal node, so you'll have to duplicate it in drupal if you want the world to see it. There was some talk on the CiviCRM list-serve about a not-yet released newsletter module called Ninjitsu Newsletter that was developed by Agaric consulting for uas.coop - that would let you select Drupal nodes as CiviMail newsletter elements, which would be handy for making an email newsletter out of Drupal content. I'm not sure what happened to this, but I hope that talk is here - http://www.nabble.com/html-newsletter-generation-module-td11966838s15986...
I used to use SimpleMail - but, because we are running this on a shared hosting account, I had to throttle the email down to less than 100 emails per hour in order to not be marked as spam by our ISP (dreamhost). Because our mailing list grew to over 1000, anything that was a high priority 'action alert' might take 10 hours to send in this throttled down state. But, if you are running a newsletter and do not expect to have more than a couple hundred addresses on it, and you are comfortable sending mail from your own server, SimpleMail is a very easy solution.
Just lately I have seen a Constant Contact module for Drupal - http://drupal.org/project/constant_contact . That might also be worth looking at. It seems like those with larger lists needs to use a commercial service of some kind.
I've be very interested in hearing more on this subject and finding out what others are doing.
barry
CiviMail
CiviMail is what we're looking at using. I run my sites on a VPS right now, so I can't run CiviMail on my own. We're looking at using uas.coop's service. When it gets to the point where my clients' lists get big enough, we'll move over to a dedicated server and then run CiviMail on our own.
Jenni Simonis
Gresham, OR
Jenni Simonis
http://www.forwardsupport.com
MailChimp
I've started work on a MailChimp integration module, probably similar to what's been done for Constant Contact. I have the module working on MomHub, but need to polish up the code a bit before publishing it. I also have a Drupal project space reserved ready to drop the code into, http://drupal.org/projects/mailchimp. I can share what I have, and would be happy if anyone wants to contribute.
Lev Tsypin
ThinkShout, Inc.
thinkshout.com | twitter.com/levelos