Using Views to Send Mass E-Mail

I started something like this some time ago and haven't been able to work on it since. The idea designed was to identify a view as an 'email view' that had some settings where you could identify where the email should go for each item in the view (either to the uid of the node author or to an email field from the view itself, like a CCK email field). You specify if the email should go immediately or in the future and if it is to go in the future whether the view should be regenerated at that time to pick up any changes or whether the view should be 'frozen' so that you would send to exactly the same people the view selects at the time the email is scheduled. I wanted to try to tie it into the actions module to handle the scheduling but never got that far.

Then you use exposed filters on the view to narrow it down to the group that should get an email and type in the message they should get. It used some substitutions from the view so you could tailor the message to include the node title or whatever (and those should be updated to use the Tokens module).

Anyway, it is partly done and it was working at one time for sending the email immediately, but it is very dusty and rusty. If there is interest and no one else has anything better, I can pull it out and see if anyone wants to work on it.

partially related: http://drupal.org/node/136251

I've pulled this out and updated it for 5.x and have it mostly but not completely working. I decided I need it too (the reason I created it in the first place), so I'm going to try to get it more finished and create a project for it. I'll post back here soon with a link.

OK, got it mostly working. If there is interest I can create a project for this, but perhaps you planned to create a project of your own?? If so, you can use what I have however you like. I'm not particularly looking for more modules to maintain, so if someone else wants to take this and run, that's fine with me.

Under admin/settings/views_mail you can set it up to operate in test mode which will either display the mail but not actually send it or send it to a test address. Then when it's working right, you can turn test mode off.

Set up any view and give it the View type of 'Views mail'. That will cause it to have a collapsed fieldset on top of the view where you can type in your message. You can send it to the node author, or to a text value in the form like a CCK name or email field. I want to get it working for CCK nodereference fields (to send to the author of the referenced node) and CCK userreference fields (to send to the referenced user), but that part is not completely working.

The biggest problems are with the new 5.x multistep form. It sometimes gets stuck on a step and won't progress. I think I have it mostly working but occasionally still get stuck, but at this point I'm assuming it's because I'm testing this by refreshing the form over and over which isn't really a real world scenario.

this is a great functionality - I'd love to see a project for this.

Thank you very much for this module, I think It's gonna be very useful to me with some adjustments.

I want exactly this, but not sending the newsletter but the result of a view (selecting some nodes filtered by cities) to send local news, but I haven't seen this option here, not in simplenews at the moment...

And something very important, that cost me a couple of days to realize...

If you want to select your view, in the menu: "Views Mail Processing" -> Select View:

You have to edit the View you created (following the steps yo said) but in the "tag" must have: "views_mail"

I was getting mad, until I opened the code and saw the select:
$res = db_query("SELECT name,description FROM {views_view} WHERE tag = 'views_mail' ORDER BY description");

Just, for the newbies in the future....

I would really like to use this module. However, it seems that I am unable to use User:Email as the email field to reference. It says it's invalid when I configure the mailing.

For Drupal 6.x?