Using UE to send email to all email addresses in database

Hi,

Occasionally our club needs to send an email to all the members of our club. But we don’t need the sophistication (tracking, subscriptions, etc.) of a product specifically for that purpose. I see from the UE FAQ’s this can be done, but I am having trouble understanding how to go about it.

Do I need a form? How do I ultimately send the message once I complete the Create Email Message wizard?

Could someone please help me with the steps I need to go through to do this. I have the UE that is now part of CSS Form Builder 2.

I have email addresses in two columns in my database.

I would like to save the setup so it can be used again.

Thanks,
Dennis

Good morning Dennis :)

I've personally used UE v.4 to produce and send a monthly newsletter to 10k+ folks numerous times successfully.

You'll need your email addresses to be saved in a MySQL table.
You'll need to create a PHP page in Dreamweaver CS3, CS4, or CS5

The PHP page you design can either select the email addresses you want to send, or send to all. It really depends on what you want to do.

The Content can be Static or Dynamic, that also depends on what you want to do.

Tom,

Thanks for replying, I'm glad you were able to get it to work for you.

However I am in need of more specific help and some answers to the questions I asked.

Dennis

First off, how many emails will there be? Depending on your web host and server ti out intervals, it may be difficult to send to a large list. Web assist has mentioned here that for that reason it's really not meant to send in such bulk, although it will work if the server allow it.

You need a form on a page basically with only a submit button. Create a recorset on the page that contains all the email addresses. You said you have them in two columns - I'm assuming it's the same email address in each column, but you'll only need to use one column.

Open the UE wizard and enter all the necessary info like mail server, subject line, from, and your content for the email message. There are a few different ways to create the email content, read the support files and tutorials for this.

For the "to" field, you'll be able to choose the email column from the recordset and specify to send once per entry, so it loops through all the email addresses and sends the email for each one.

Again, depending on the size of your list, you may have problems. It can take several it's to loops through a large list, so specify a redirect page. When that comes up you'll know it worked. However, if you get an error, then the server may have times out - and yo will have sent to some of the list, but not all, and there's no way to know where it stopped.

Hi Lon,

It will be just under 600 emails.

The two columns contain different email addresses. Can I pull from each of them?



Dennis

Hmmmm. Off the top of my head, I'd say no. You could create two recordsets, one for each column of emails. I'd have to go look at UE to see if it let's you use more than one, not sure without looking.

You could also write a single recordset that combines all the email addreses into a single list, or write a query in the database. But that may be a little over complicated.

The only sure way I can think of now is to have two pages with submit buttons, where one sends to the first list, the other send to the second list. That way you're only sending 300 at a time, reducing the risk of server timeouts.

Thanks Lon,

Two seperate pages/submit buttons is not a problem.

With your help I have been able to set up the page/submit button and by manually putting my own email address in the To or BCC field of UE, successfully send the email.

Now I'm ready to try pulling the email addresses from the rcordset. Do I need to filter the recordset on non blank email address fields? Or will UE's recordset loop ignore them?

Dennis