Newsletters..

Back in the old MLS days, I had a custom script that I used to send out my newsletter. It wasn't necessarily efficient, but it got the job done. There was no error handling, if an email failed it just went away. I had set up an easy way for people unsubscribe etc.. It was all a hack on the old snitz stuff. When I upgraded to DNN, I decided to just use the built in newsletter module. I figured that it would work well enough.. I suppose it was somewhat of a step back. I know that a lot of folks have complained about the built in newletter sending capabilities. To be honest, I don't know if I was having any problems or not. I knew at least some of my emails were going out because I was getting a traffic spike and I'd been tagging my links for Google Analytics and could see the results there. But aside from that, I had zero visibility into my email campaigns. I also thought that the sending mechanism was a tad tedious, and allowing people to unsubscribe was very painful. I had to tell people how to log into their accounts and go to their profile and unjoin the role to which the newsletter was sent. That made for some unhappy people. Also, I had a list of approximately 7600 email addresses, and I was sure that a good number of them were no longer valid (the list is 9 years old). I needed to scrub the list. I looked at building my own solution, but knew that I just didn't have the time to mess with it. I looked around for a solution. I came across Bulk Emailer from Interactivewebs.com.au a while ago. I had just purchased their feedback form module and liked how it worked. At the time, I didn't want to spend that kind of money on an email sending module. I went back and took a look again and they now have a demo that you can download. I decided to give it a test run in my real environment.

I dowloaded and installed the module following along in the PDF manual that is included. Configuring everything took a little time, but I persisted. I set up the bounce email address, pointed the module to it and had at it. A really nice feature of this module is the ability to write and HTML page and the module will then convert it to the correct format, replace tokens, and send it on its way. Much the same way my old system did. I took one of my old templates, reformatted it a bit, and sent a couple test emails. Things looked good, so I sent the email out to everyone. It took longer to send out all the emails than I thought it should. My understanding is this can be adjusted, and I will do that. It took about 7 hours to send all 7600 emails. Overall, I'm impressed. I now know that nearly 1800 of the addresses in my list were bad, I know approximately how many people have read my emails, and I've had about 30 people be removed from my list. Not bad.

There are definitely some things that I would like to see changed. The opt-out page blocks users from getting any emails at all through the system. Since I don't currently run multiple lists, it's not an issue.. But if I did, there's no way to allow the users to opt out of only one list. That could be a problem. I think that the structure of the mailing lists could use some refinement. Right now, you can send an email to either a list, or a dnn role. I think that instead of sending directly to a list, you should have to create a list and then assign the DNN role to the list. A little better integration with DNN roles as far as unregistering would be nice.

In the end, this is a "buy" module. I'm very happy with it. I'll be placing my order soon.