Simplenews: Send newsletters to subscribed e-mail addresses

Simplenews sends html or plain text newsletters to the subscription list. Subscription and unsubscription are managed through a block, a form or by the newsletter administrator.
Individual newsletters are grouped by a newsletter taxonomy term. Newsletters can have a block with the ability of (un)subscription, listing of recent newsletters and an associated rss-feed.
Sending of large mailings can be managed by cron.

Installation

• Create a new directory "simplenews" in the sites/all/modules directory and place the entire contents of this simplenews folder in it.
• Enable the module on the Modules admin page: Administer > Site building > Modules
• Grant the proper access to user accounts at the Access control page: Administer > User management > Access control.
  To enable users to (un)subscribe to a newsletter use the "subscribe to newsletters" permission. This will enable the Simplenews block where the user can (un)subscribe to a newsletter. Use the "view links in block" permission to enable the display of previous newsletters in the Simplenews block.
• Enable the Simplenews block on the Administer blocks page: Administer > Site building > Blocks.
  One block is available for each newsletter you have on the website. Note that multiple newsletter blocks with subscription form does not work. This is a known bug in Drupal 5 version of Simplenews. See http://drupal.org/node/121479

Configuration

• Configure Simplenews on the Simplenews admin pages: Administer > Content Management > Newsletters > Settings.
• Configure the Simplenews block on Administer > Content management > Newsletters > Settings > your newsletter > Block options.

Access control

To enable users to (un)subscribe to a newsletter use the "subscribe to newsletters" permission. This will enable the Simplenews block where the user can (un)subscribe to a newsletter.
Use the "view links in block" permission to enable the display of recent newsletters in the Simplenews block.

Simplenews blocks

One block is available for each newsletter you have on the website. Note that multiple newsletter blocks with a subscription form on one page does not work. This is a known bug in this version of Simplenews.
Block content is controlled by access control and the Newsletter Settings for the individual newsletters.

Collaboration with other modules

• The Taxonomy module is required by Simplenews. Simplenews creates a "Newsletter" vocabulary which contains terms for each series of newsletters. Each newsletter node is tagged with one of the terms to group it into one of the newsletter series.
• By using Mime Mail module Simplenews can send HTML emails. Mime Mail takes care of the MIME-encoding of the email. Mime Mail is also used to send emails with attachments, both plain text and HTML emails.
• Simplenews Template module provides a themable template with configurable header, footer and style. Each newsletter can be themed independently.
• Simplenews Roles is a helper module for Simplenews. It automatically populates a newsletter subscription list with users from specified roles.
• Simplenews and Category module are currently not compatible. See the Category module issue queue for more information.
• Cron jobs are required to send large mailing lists. Cron jobs can be triggered by Poormanscron or any other cron mechanism such as crontab. Make sure that the number of newsletters send per cron run will not exceed the time interval between two cron jobs. The number of newsletter per cron is set at the Newsletter Settings page.