"Virtual" mailing list

[Blizz]

Hey,

First of all, we have been using LMPro to send out newsletters bi-weekly to over 14k people with great ease, brilliant product, never regretted the purchase!

Anyway, I have a sort of question. Is there an easy way to setup a 1-use disposable list automatically and have LM do the mailing and then remove the list again?

We need do regulary mail out to a couple 100 email addresses, but almost never more then once to the same group. At this moment we use LM to send to the fixed lists like our newsletter subscribers and a simple foreach ( ) -> mail ( ) loop for the temp lists.

I would like to transfer all addresses to LMPro temporary and have it send the mail the way it is supposed to (the loop is to server-intensive).

Customizing php stuff is absolutely no problem. I just would like to know the best way. Do I put the data in LM or is there a way I can have LM 'get' the addressess from a db-table or something?

Any ideas? Thanks.

[DW]

Greetings,

How exactly are you grouping the users?  Can you accomplish what you require with the "User Selection" feature?  In "User Selection" there is also the ability to setup a "Custom Query".  If the query complexity is an issue perhaps a small custom script on the side could be used to generate a custom query.

Regards

[Blizz]

The fact is that I'm actually only using the mailing functionality of LM. Not the (un)subscribe part etc. So even for my main lists, users on a list are managed via my own custom code (they tick a box in their profile that they want or do not want a newsletter and I update the list accordingly).

I was just wondering what the best way is to create a temporary list with 1 use. Basically a way to give LM a list of email addresses, a mail to sent (with one or more !user codes in) and have the mail sent out, afterwards clean up the list. What I want to avoid is to have any of our nitwits toying around with LM, as I don't trust them.

I was considering just inserting a new record in the lm_lists table, then add all users to the lm_users table like i do for my main list. But how do I continue from there? Can I pass a mail to LM and tell it to send it "now"?
Afterwards both lm_lists and lm_users would be restored.

[DW]

Alright, so you want a separate script to send an email to a group of imported users. This would be a fairly involved add-on.  The following would need to be done:

1) Import users into a new list via uploaded file
2) Insert the message into "Sent Messages" so it can be queued
3) Start a new queue/batch ID and insert entries into the queue table
4) Start sending (call to ListMail's domail() function with the queue batch ID)

If this is all correct I estimate this would take me about 3-6 hours work to develop an interface and get right.  I would have to charge $200-$250 for this and, additionally, do not have that kind of time right now.

Perhaps there is an easier method.  We could take out some steps, such as the complicated queuing and sending, by using the existing ListMail scheduler.  It's fairly easy to insert a message into that process, but I understand you may not want your messages to be sent at the same time every day.  To solve this, dailymail could be run more often than once per day but with special options to skip certain procedures, such as followup sending.

That would leave us with the more straight-forward importing of users and scheduling of messages (1-3 hours).

Hopefully we can figure something out that will work for you.

Regards

[Blizz]

Thanks for the info. It's already done and working. I basically encapsulated LMPro with code that creates the mailinglist, adds the users and then calls the necessary things directly in LMPro followed by a cleanup. That way I didn't need to modify the LM code while still being able to use the LM mailing functionality.

[DW]

Glad to hear you figured something out - Nicely done!