Newsletter Setup - That Wasn’t So Bad
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In a previous article I outlined some of the typical email list tools and mentioned my desire to begin learning the hopefully profitable practice of list building. A couple
days ago I happened to be poking around in my hosting CPanel and noticed that within Fantastico there was a free PHP and MySQL based email list management program.
Given that it was free, I immediately concluded that it probably wouldn’t really be that useful…probably lacking all the features that I need I thought. But I decided to check it out despite my skepticism.
Much to my surprise I discovered that phpList is really cool:
PHPlist is a double opt-in newsletter manager. It is written in PHP and uses an SQL database for storing the information. PHPlist is software that runs on a server.
PHPlist is designed to assist you to stay in touch with your audience, without flooding them with information they don’t want. PHPlist is an essential tool for anyone who is serious about creating, capturing and maintaining an offline audience, and will help you increase traffic to your website.
And the most amazing thing of all: IT’S FREE.
This software is actually surprisingly good and is very feature rich. Here’s a rundown of what you’ll get for the grand total of zero dollars:
- Posting to the mailinglist is via a webpage.
- phplist enforces a double opt-in subscription system.
- Open Tracking. You can see how many users opened your email.
- Click Tracking. You can enable tracking all clicks of all URLs in the emails you send and PHPlist will report on the clicks on every single email.
- Send a Webpage. Just tell PHPlist the URL of a webpage you want to send to your users and it will fetch it and send it out.
- Templates. It is very easy to adapt the public pages of the system to fit into your website.
- Attributes. You can specify information you want to get from users when they sign up.
- Multiple subscribe pages.
- Personalisation. You can use the attributes you define in the emails you send, to make every email personal to the user who receives them.
- PHPlist supports HTML emails. If a user indicates they want HTML email they can receive it that way.
- Multiple List managers.
- Easy import and export. Use TAB delimited files to import your existing list of users or to export the users on the PHPlist system for use in your in-house database.
- Personal Details. Every email a user receives will contain a personalised URL to update the users’ preferences.
- Attachments. You can add attachments to your message.
- Batch Processing. To facilitate shared hosting environments, you can specify the maximum number of emails to send in a time period you identify. This can also be overridden by ISPs who can set these values server wide to apply to any PHPlist installation on that machine.
- Set up Throttling to make sure that the load on your server does not become excessive so it halts
- ISP Friendly. Apart from the limit on values for batch processing that the ISP can enforce, there is an additional option for ISPs to suspend sending during busy times in the day.
- User management. You can use several in built tools to handle large databases of users.
- Bounce handling. Bounces can be processed and users will be automatically unsubscribed when too many emails to them bounced.
- Manual Text entry. By default PHPlist will turn your content entered as HTML into plain text for the users who want to receive text, but it is also
- Automated PDF creation. To ensure users can read the message regardless of mail reader, the message can be automatically converted to PDF and attached to the email.
- RSS feeds. PHPlist can be set up to read a range of RSS sources and send the contents on a regular basis to users.
- PHPlist is now also available in languages other than english, although the translation work is still in progress
- Easy install. Just copy the files to your website folder, tell the login details of the SQL database and it’s done.
Wow, it had every feature that I could have dream of an more. So I spend the better part of day installing and configuring it. To be honest it was a very easy install, as with most Fantastico applications…but there is still time required to configure. I’m sure this would be true of any email service that you would use. The configuration was simple enough, the only thing lacking, as is often the case with open source software, is that lack of really “for dummies” set up guide.
Basically you need to do stuff like set up the email accounts to be used for sending emails and an ‘abuse’ account, configure all the messages that get sent when users do things like subscribe, unsubscribe etc. Then there is the set up and customization of the landing pages for sign up and confirmation of sign up and removal and finally if you’re like me, you want to not send your users to a new page to sign up for your list so I had to carve the sign-up code out of default sign up page and integrate it
into the WordPress template.
Also worth mentioning is that phpList can handle multiple lists on a single installation. So what I did was install it to my company domain name “jigsaw-online.net” with the intention of using it for any/all sites that have lists, you can also install it to a directory on your site [eg. artofmoney.org/list] and that will work as well.
You’ll get to see this when I crack out my new template in the next couple days, but if you want to try it out via the default sign-up page you can get a head start on crowds 
and have a first hand look at how this cool system works. Please let me know if you have any problems or any comments or suggestions.