Collaboration with simplenews
| Project: | Mass Contact |
| Version: | 5.x-1.x-dev |
| Component: | Miscellaneous |
| Category: | task |
| Priority: | normal |
| Assigned: | Unassigned |
| Status: | active |
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The functionality of such a module is very much desired. It is always a pain in Drupal sites, to have no easy way of emailing all the site members, certainly not sending mails to only part of them (whether by role, or by profile field, or any other criteria).
There is a module called Advanced user (advuser.module), which already does the tasks mentioned here, but it does a terribly slow work in querying the DB.
On top of that, and that's my main point - sending mails to hundreds or thousands of subscribers, MUST be managed through cron, or else, once a certain threshold is reached, the server will be choked.
Simplenews is doing a wonderful job in managing a scheduled/partitioned sending, but it lacks the important functionality of creating an on-the-fly mailing list, by criteria.
I suggest using the simplenews infrastructure for the sending, and only add the criteria functionality to it.
#1
So you're looking for two things:
1) a partitioned sending routine which wouldn't choke the server
2) a way to create mail groups on the fly.
I hadn't realized that sending mail to large numbers via php would be problematic. This is something for consideration.
I wanted to answer #2 by saying that this is an issue for the roles part of drupal - the ability to create roles on the fly would solve your problem, but I can see how it might be problematic, as roles are also used for permissions. It is possible that this module could be integrated with the organic groups module. A submodule could be created which is dependent on the og module and allows one to send to an entire og group. That is passing the buck on to the og module to allow group creation on the fly, I know. Unfortunately, all of this is beyond what I am able to do at this time. If someone would like to take up the task, I'd be happy to facilitate.
#2
1) I've added a partitioned send routine option to 1.3 Try it out once it comes up.
2) Something similar is being discussed here:
http://drupal.org/node/136208
I would rather see this kind of function generally available via the roles part of drupal. I think it is a case for the core user.module.