I want my "add me to updates" form to be automatic

[djsound]

so on the index page of this site I made I had a form that says "add me for automatic updates"..and has a form where the person inputs their email address....right now it send me an email that has their email address and I manually add them to a group in my Mail.app for when I send out the updates periodically. What I would prefer is for this to be done automatically. When they input their email address it is automatically added so some kind of database with the others....then when I send the update it just send to all of those....anyone know how to set this up? or a site that can explain it? thanks

 

[Sijmen]

This is generally called newsletter software. I’d suggest looking into CampaignMonitor, which will give you HTML code for a form you can embed (and customise) plus an online interface for managing your list and sending out newsletters. Another similar service is MailChimp.

 

[djsound]

Those are interesting but I am not sure that's what I need. I just want to send a monthly email to people with updates. To whoever adds their email to my mailing list....but I'd like that list to be compiled automatically from the main page on my site where they input the email address...I thought maybe I could do it with php

 

[Laird Knox]

Many years ago I did things like that with CGIs and Perl. I just did a quick search and found this page: http://www.hawkwings.net/plugins.htm

It looks like you can script Mail with AppleScript. Take a look at the extensive list. There might be just what you need there. Or you might find something close that can be modified to do the job.

 

[djsound]

That is just a bunch of mac apps. The client I am doing this for does not even own a mac I don't think. If you look at this page they just want some like this where it says "sign up for news letter".

http://www.garibaldiresources.com/s/Home.asp

The thing is they are not great at using computers and they do not want to file all the emails that come in from that form. They want all the email address that come from that form to go to one database. That they can later send newsletters too. Same as that site. It is quite common, I see those on half the sites I go to....

 

[Mal]

Trust me, it's going to be much easier to just use MailChimp. They have a free option, as long as it's less that 2000 contacts and less than 12,000 emails per month. You just embed their signup form on your website, and you can compose the emails elsewhere and copy/paste, or use their forms. For someone that's not computer-savvy, it's really the best way by far, and since it's free, nothing to lose really.

EDIT: If you want to see an example form, here's mine: http://www.thewalkersinjapan.com/p/contact-us_3431.html

jW

 

[djsound]

OK your page has forms. I know how to make forms, I just don't know how to send the results to a database that can be used to send to later. I am just creating this website for a client. I do not want to have to be involved every time they want to send something from a MailChimp account. I am pretty sure they are not going to want to use a MailChimp account themselves. I don't think they would know how. They just want to be able to go to their email and send an email update to people.....and what if it is over 2000 people?

 

[Mal]

I haven't checked, it may be possible to set it up so they can simply send an email to a single address and have it forwarded out by MailChimp or similar to all the address in the database. The form I put on the website is powered directly by MailChimp, though, which is why I showed it. The entries from that are sent directly to their servers.

It's just fairly complex to set this up manually, and I don't know all the steps (I've tried before, in fact).

jW