“Join our mailing list” How does it work?

[sethgoochdesigns]

Hey guys, so I have a friend who is working with a client and they need a “Join our mailing list” form on their website and he wants my help. Basically, they would just enter their name and email address to be submitted and then it would process and say something like “Thanks for joining our mailing list!” and then it would just confirm what name and email address has been added to the list. I’ve never worked with any kind of mailing lists so I’m not familiar with it and I’m not sure of how it even works. Like once the form is submitted…where does it go and how does the “admin” see all the users who joined the mailing list and how do they get the emails once added to the “mailing list”? Is there any tutorials out there you could direct me to? or what do you guys suggest? free professional solutions out there? It’s not going to be a huge and national site, so I just need something that will get the job done nicely. I appreciate your time and advice.

[Chris Coyier]

Easiest way: Sign up for http://www.mailchimp.com/- create a list in there, and they’ll provide you with copy and paste code of a form you can use to do exactly this.

[gno]

I have no idea if there exist any kind of web based mail-list-software out there… But I doubt that you will be able to find something that fits your setup just right.

The easiest way I can think of is by just making a database of the names and email addresses. And then use the SwiftMailer PHP library to manage the sending of emails.

SwiftMailer makes sending emails from PHP as easy as – if I were with the boys I’d probably have said your momma, but well… ;-)

I’m using SwiftMail and gmail smtp servers to send emails to my self from my website contact form. It’s nice and easy and wont ever get caught in my spam filer due to the email being sent from Gmail servers.

SwiftMailer is available at: http://swiftmailer.org/

[gno]

Thanks for the link to mailchimp Chris – I’m sure that will be of good use sometime :-)

If you dont want to do any kind of programming and wont send more than 6000 emails a month, MailChimp seems to be the better solution for you, Seth.

[sethgoochdesigns]

Thanks Chris and gno for your input…they were both helpful. I think MailChimp is going to be my best bet. Thanks again!

-Seth-

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