Mailing list - does it work?

Has anyone else had problems using the mailing list module? Since I started using EC last June I've only managed to send one newsletter out - the rest of the time they stay stuck in a queue - not sure how to budge them from there.

I'm about to give up and write some code to extract the email addresses from the DB, export them to Outlook Express and send them from there.

Unless anyone has any ideas how I could get this module to work?

Cheers,

Charles

I've played with it a little and had the same experience.  I finally got Esvon to look at it and ended up sending out 4 duplicate emails to all registered users. 

I looked pretty silly, had one person file a spamcop complaint and got nasty emails from another dozen or so.

I've not had the courage to go back and try again.

A good friend of mine owns a CMS/email marketing company and I'm looking at porting their software to php and integrating it into the database.  This would give me the ability to send templated emails that are populated from the database, on a schedule based on a wide variety of variables.

i.e., if someone registers (and opts in) but does not post an ad, send them a thank you email in three days with cool items that have been posted in that timeframe.

if someone registers and posts an ad, send them a weekly email for 4 weks with the ad view stats and other cool items that have been posted.

if someone registers, posts an ad, and upgrades it, . . . . . and so on. .


Hope this helps. . .

-jay

Thanks for that - glad to hear I'm not alone- I think I'm going to ditch it - don't really have much use for it anyway... I'll keep collecting e-mail addresses anyway, just in case.

Cheers
Charles

I haven't ever gotten it to work either! im glad im not the only one...

Jay - I would like to know more about what program you would use to do what your talking about!

Charles, what i do is export the user list each time i want to send an update. (shh... ive ignored wether or not they want the update for now) and i put it in a program called mailbomber which extracts just the email addys. if you want a link to where to get that program let me know.

I do the same thing - export the list each time I do a mailing.  I use Esvon to collect the email addresses and give people a way to sign up / unsubscribe from the site, as well as sign up during registration. But there are dozens of much better scripts available for mailing list management, and many of them could concievably be integrated with an installation of Esvon. I'm in agreement that the Esvon ML management module is a bit lame... but then, it's alot to ask when other companies spend their lives on that problem alone.

Here are some good email management scripts:
 
 Octeth OEMPro
 http://octeth.com/

 Interspire SendStudio
 http://www.interspire.com/

 1-2-All
 http://www.activecampaign.com/12all/

Beware of webhost bandwidth limits and "spam" catchers when your list gets big...

--Lorin

I've had my eye on SendStudio for a while now, their support is very good.  Has anyone tried phplist?

http://tincan.co.uk/?lid=453

It's very feature rich, and seems now to include just about everything the paid for versions offer, including click tracking and the all important (to me) multipart emails with seperately edited HTML and text only ability.  I don't currently have time to check it out thoroughly myself so it would be nice if someone here had used it and could offer some thoughts.

Cheers,


Frank.

Hi folks, well I must be on my own here but the module has always worked really well for me.  I make up my newsletters in frontpage and then paste in the html, click add and away you go.  Works every time for me.  Been having trouble with the 'unsubscribe' feature though.  I've just posted a question about it.

I do agree though it is a bit cumbersome.  Have you seen Impact Engine?  It's a cool multimedia messaging service working through email with all the usual control features you would expect from a professional mailing package.  You can give it a test run as I did and within a few minutes I'd come up with a groovy new multimedia message.  Very easy, user friendly and flash - but a bit expensive for me at the moment.  Worth a look though:
http://www.impactengine.com/myie/login.asp

Cheers, Linds

I used to have a two years old version of phplist, it was good even with large number of users. Now I'm planning to install the new release.

Regards,
majid

funny, I just tried the mailing list again and it worked so I guess it my previouys (rubbish) server that was causing the problem.

previouys (rubbish) server

Mailing list works perfectly. The server can be a problem!