Some Suggestions and Problems
| Project: | Mailout |
| Version: | 5.x-1.0-alpha2 |
| Component: | User interface |
| Category: | feature request |
| Priority: | normal |
| Assigned: | Unassigned |
| Status: | closed |
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Hello,
thank you for this great module. I have been trying to figure out your module. It actually took me a bit to figure out how to send the mailouts, until I realized that after "submit" there was a "Send Mailout"... and then a "Send" button... and then a "Run Cron" that I had to do (which wasn't too obvious).
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Checking multiple emails
Sometimes my friends want to use the module to send to huge lists of emails. Usually friends. My friend talked about trying to send an email about an important political action for his fellow countrymen, so he grabbed a bunch of lists of emails (forwards) that come to him, and wanted to use it to send mail to them. Sometimes similar people appear in multiple lists. A small check couldn't hurt right? I believe you are already aware of this though.
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There is a subscribe module (or newsletter), perhaps some subscription capabilities would be nice
That module allows members to have an access like 'subscribe_to_mailout' or 'subscribe_to_mailout_template' in your case (IF the mailout template is published) that way, someone can stay subscribed or opt out of like a weekly newsletter, right?
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When someone clicks an Opt-Out link, they are added to the database, but the administrator cannot see the list without going into phpmyadmin (some administrators are not gurus of the web).
This can be quite a problem because, if you put up lists again, and there is like 24 people who "opted out", you have to go to phpmyadmin and find all these people and using your browser find and delete all these emails from your custom list. I don't even know how you can fix this if you were sending to like a specific role "authenticated user". Can get quite annoying if there is hundreds...
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Plain-text emails, cannot be tracked
This probably has no solution. Though perhaps a small feedback page can be created (in the future), where you automatically add this link "Did you like this email?" and people that click on it will get tracked as "read", and they can answer a question like "yes" and "no" which you can also track. Which would be good for websites that want to see what people like and don't like.
These are just ideas, keep up the good work, and I hope you will at least consider them, and I understand some of them may be difficult/time-consuming.
#1
I forgot something, which is actually probably the most important suggestion:
The "From" box in emails seem to indicate your email without the @blabla.com part.
I sent an email from mysite@my.com and the from message came as from "mysite". Is it possible for another text field so that the person can write that in himself? Such as "My Site.com" or something specific.
#2
Hi thanks for all the suggestions.
re: from name in addition to address
This is a good suggestion and I will look into implementing
re:Checking multiple emails
mailout should currently only be sending one email per address (ie removing duplicates)
re: subscription
subscription functionality is built in, although the setup/interfaces has not been documented much so it may not be obvious. Also, this may only be in the dev version, which I should release as another alpha/beta soon. You can create a mail list, then enable a subscription block that allows people to sign up (or build your own sign up form). You can then send mailouts to a specific mail list.
re: opt out interface
yes more work needs to go into making this interface usable for the administrator. right now I mainly just have the back-end guts in place
re: plain text = no tracking
for now this is just the way it is. i don't really see that much value in 'tracking' as no metric can give accurate results. the feature is in here as it was a client request. although, it would be easy enough to build your own form and link to it from an email if you want feedback etc.
Thanks a lot for the feedback. i have a lot of updates and changes I would like to make to this module, (mostly UI and workflow restructuring) but right now I am finding it hard to find time to devote to this. hopefully in the upcoming weeks I will be able to devote a night to this and release a more complete alpha/beta and then think about porting to SIX.
#3
Hi. Most of these requests are now implemented. Except the last one, for now.
#4
Automatically closed -- issue fixed for two weeks with no activity.