newsletter project is the 4.0 available for it?

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lostdeviant
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newsletter project is the 4.0 available for it?

Post by lostdeviant »

hi, I've been looking for a system for email for writing some php scripts for managing newsletters for multiple sites and various lists. I've been thinking about phpmailer, but I don't like the requirement to modify the php.ini file since I currently use several shared server accounts.

I keep reading here and in the swiftmailer page that 4.0 is ready and that to use it code needs to be rewritten, so where is it?

If it really isn't going to be released, does anyone have any suggestions for an alternative?
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onion2k
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Re: newsletter project is the 4.0 available for it?

Post by onion2k »

Do you actually need any of the features in 4? Why not just use version 3?
lostdeviant
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Re: newsletter project is the 4.0 available for it?

Post by lostdeviant »

I don't know. I hardly understand most of the features listed and I really don't see a definitive list of features for version 4. The list I found here looked like a might-be-included feature list. I really don't like the idea of having to rewrite my scripts when the next version is released (supposing it will be). I have a few months of experience writing php scripts which interact with mysql, but using php for HTML e-mail seems extra complicated.

I need to be able to have HTML emails, somehow queue messages for sending, manage bounced messages, have attachments, and include database generated content. I want to later include auto-responders to be able to let people sign up for series/courses.

I've already set up a simple user registration with a confirmation email and an unsubscribe link with a get variable.
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onion2k
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Re: newsletter project is the 4.0 available for it?

Post by onion2k »

lostdeviant wrote:I really don't like the idea of having to rewrite my scripts when the next version is released (supposing it will be).
Why would you need to do that? Just stick with version 3. You don't have to update just because there's a new version released ... if the script works with the old version then stick with it. I'm still running V.1 on some of my sites. I'll update it if I need to, but at the moment I don't.
lostdeviant
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Re: newsletter project is the 4.0 available for it?

Post by lostdeviant »

Do you think the current version will be adequate? I'm also concerned about future incompatibilities with new versions of php, etc.
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onion2k
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Re: newsletter project is the 4.0 available for it?

Post by onion2k »

lostdeviant wrote:Do you think the current version will be adequate? I'm also concerned about future incompatibilities with new versions of php, etc.
Swiftmailer is one of the best bits of PHP I've ever seen. Certainly the best free code. It's more than adequate. It's a hell of a lot better than some of the rubbish out there (eg PHPMailer).

As for compatibility with future versions... I don't imagine that will be a problem. Besides, have you been writing your code with PHP 6 in mind?
lostdeviant
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Re: newsletter project is the 4.0 available for it?

Post by lostdeviant »

onion2k wrote:
lostdeviant wrote: As for compatibility with future versions... I don't imagine that will be a problem. Besides, have you been writing your code with PHP 6 in mind?
I have been trying to. I don't know all of the differences between 5 or 6, but this relative newbie is trying.

I guess I'll try with the current version and hope my code will still work. I love how there are code snippets available as examples which will help a lot.

So this is much better than phpmailer? I'm glad I found swiftmailer before starting that stage of my project. Thanks for the info.
lostdeviant
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Re: newsletter project is the 4.0 available for it?

Post by lostdeviant »

I wanted to let you know that I was able to upload the lib files and run the HTML email tutorial script with changes to include authentication. I was able to send myself (other email account) a test HTML email.

It did take me a few minutes to figure out how to add SMTP authentication since it wasn't there in the example, but I'm happy that it was easy to do.

I remember spending several hours trying to get an HTML email sent using regular sendmail (I never did get it to work with HTML mail).

It should be pretty easy to replace the field info with variables and use it as an include file.


I hope sending to a list is just as easy. I'll be reading the tutorials. It is great to see so much documentation.

it looks like I need to use batch send with
$recipients->addTo("user@domain.com", "name");
one per subscriber.

I'll be pulling info from a database table for that, any recommendations for the best way to do it?
I'm leaning toward using a while loop something like:

while ($data = mysql_fetch_row($result))
{
$recipients->addTo($data[0], $data[1]);
}
lostdeviant
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Re: newsletter project is the 4.0 available for it?

Post by lostdeviant »

ok, got that all set up... too bad Hotmail automatically sends everything to junkmail.
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onion2k
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Re: newsletter project is the 4.0 available for it?

Post by onion2k »

lostdeviant wrote:ok, got that all set up... too bad Hotmail automatically sends everything to junkmail.
That'll be due to the content of your email, it's not Swiftmailer's fault. In particular I suggest you read this: http://www.swiftmailer.org/wikidocs/v3/ ... tml_emails
lostdeviant
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Re: newsletter project is the 4.0 available for it?

Post by lostdeviant »

I've gone through that and I've made it multipart with text and html versions and still not getting much Hotmail love.
Perhaps it will work its way out of the junk mail folder as I add more content.

Thanks again..

Now I'm going to research setting up email tracking. It would be nice to see when a message is opened.
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onion2k
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Re: newsletter project is the 4.0 available for it?

Post by onion2k »

lostdeviant wrote:Now I'm going to research setting up email tracking. It would be nice to see when a message is opened.
It'd be lovely. But it's not going to happen. Tracking emails these days is pretty much impossible. Servers don't return anything and images are never loaded by default. You can still use tracking but you need to be aware that however you implement it it'll be horrendously inaccurate.
lostdeviant
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Re: newsletter project is the 4.0 available for it?

Post by lostdeviant »

Just an update.

I still haven't decided whether or not to add any image tracking, etc, but I'm happy to say I've finished all the basic functions of my autoresponder/newsletter script, so I'm very happy I won't be trapped into paying $19+/mo for a service that does the same thing.

Thank you for your help, and thank you Swiftmailer developers for making this available.
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