Creating a Mailing List Manager with PHP

this category says there are 2 comments to this article which i dont see. ( Is it jsut me? )
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what si the point of sending mail to a mailing list that you can't read the reply's? At least on the demo site there does not seem to be a way to read the List.
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Kinda of pointless if you ask me.
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Or am i mistakin here and you can read the list you sent to?

I agree... when I got the devshed announcement about this article I got excited, but looking through the source it is clear that this mailing list manager is only useful for announcements, *not* discussion.

To the author:
how could this be expanded to actually be useful? (this is tricky I think since piping /etc/aliases to a php script isn't an option as far as i know). Is there a way to free mailing list managers from the realm of Perl?

This would be wonderful for logging messages to a database... i've played with perl DBI/DBD for this but it is UGLY to say the least (php is a lot easier for DB stuff)

Any suggestions/comments??

Or maybe it's just me
But this is the error I get when I try to send an Email, This is my first anything to do with Php... so ...
I get this error with
Windows98
Xitami Web Server
an Php (of course)

Warning: Failed to Receive in webpages/php/sendemail.php3 on line 7

You're right, these scripts are actually only useful for announcements. I believe the proper name of what you may be looking for is a "list server," a program which has several configurable options to resend all replies to list members, plus be moderated or unmoderated, plus send a digest version, etc, etc. Quite a different beast.

Usually, list servers are servers, and are usually modified mail servers, or plugins to mail servers. With few exceptions, running a list server precludes running a mailserver on the same port. To write one with php would be a bit prohibitive since there are other options already available which handle the job much better than a web server would.

These scripts are meant to manage simple mailing lists just for announcements to your site, plus give a framework to automate common repetitive tasks like automatic signup, autoresponders, etc. They will do that for you, I guarantee. For a list server, check out majordomo, a grandaddy in the genre, and free. O'Reilly has a book out on it also, although you can find reams of online info about it.

Duncan

About those missing comments - I think they were from someone just testing the devshed comments system, and were probably accidental.

Actually Majordomo was exactly what I was referring to by freeing list managers from the realm of perl. Essentially I'm looking for an easy way to log list messages to a database (which would be lovely in PHP- but nasty in DBI/DBD).

However, the way that Majordomo (and the other couple of list managers i'm familiar with) work is by piping mail aliases to the perl script -- an option which is unavailable to PHP as far as I know. Therein lies my question, is there a way to do this that I just don't know, or should I continue my perl hack?

Can't you just add the #!/usr/whatever/php to the top of the php script like with perl? IIRC this will require the CGI version of php and not the Apache module though.
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And FWIW, I've created a MySQL driven mailing list manager. Currently rewriting it to add support for multiple lists. Available --><A HREF="http://www.heyes-computing.net/red.software/download/">here</A><--.

Please post these to clipscripts!

How to configue php3.ini to use mail() function under NT?

I'm getting an error message when I'm trying to create the arrays. Has anybody else encountered this problem or knows how to solve the problem?
This is the code, just like it's supposed to be according to the article:

$grouplist = split("\|", chop($groups[$index]));

You have omit the escape character "\".
The correct code should be
$grouplist=split("\|",chop($groups[$index]))

The escape character is there it's just that this forum doesn't show it. If you look att your code it isn't there either so what can the problem be?

This application really has an error, but not in the place you pointed out. If you still have some problem, you can contact me directly by e-mail. My address is lv123@yeah.net.

What error messages are you receiving? Make sure you download the source off the demo site if you haven't yet to compare it to your code. Feel free to contact me by email also.

Hi,

Does anyone have any solutions for managing a "broadcast" email list (i.e. not an email discussion) with 15,000 plus names?

We used a program which was okay going from 1K to 3K. Now, we have had to create 5 or so separate "lists" in order to handle the names . . . every time we send out an email the SMTP server crashes b/c it can't handle the load. We have had to reboot the entire server to get the SMTP back up & running.

I think PHP/MySQL might be our long term solution . . . but for now I'm looking for something short term, either a program or remotely hosted list-serv.

Then we can figure out what to do. Any suggestions appreciated.

Thanks!

Please contact me in regards to our list-server program for short term use.

regards

p.w