There are many, many uses for mailing lists, from informing users of news about your site to alerting interested people about an update to a project you are working on. Coupled with some management tools, disseminating information through a mailing list can be a snap, and new users can add themselves and be welcomed to the to the list without your involvement. There are programs available for download and for purchase which promise to do the dirty work for you, but with a little effort, PHP offers all the tools you need to create a full-featured management application which you can access from anywhere on the net. Best of all, doing it yourself will give you the skills you need to customize the application to precisely fit your needs, which is a true mark of a scripting professional.

This is not a script to create a mailing list, it's just a simple script that will allow you to send email to multiple users already stored in your database. I created a date service site in which users need to sign up to become members, since members give their email when they sign up, there was no need to put a "Join my mailing list" on my site. So basically every email is stored on the database when a member signs up. Also since members have to select the country they live in, not only i needed a function to send emails to the entire list but also send emails to members belonging only to a single country.

Simple mailing list subscription and unsubcription script. Commented code for easy undertanding. No databases required. List of emails will be stored in a file. Just copy the code provided to your site and it will work.

The admin code I created worked fine except for one bothersome thing. It would send out the email to multiple recipients and print the proper unsubscribe code, BUT the "From" mail header did not work the way it should have inside of the "all" loop. It should have been printing my from email address on every email address, however it was printing "nobody" instead. When I send the emails to any single person the header it printed correctly.

Learn abouth the mail() function in PHP, and how to specialize the parameters. The mail() function enables you to send an email from a browser.

Yesterday during the wee hours I added a mail list to my form and today I'm going to go through how I did it. The first thing you need to do is determine if the email you are dealing with is in the valid format or not. Validating email addresses isn't a perfect science, unfortunately. When you think of all the different possible formats, you have to be pretty broad -- maybe too broad -- in defining a matching pattern (or regular expression, whatever you prefer to call it). First we make sure the $php_script_list checkbox is checked. Then we check the syntax of the user submitted $from email address. The first portion of the email needs to contain at least one but likely more {alnum} alphanumeric (a-z or 0-9) character or the dash - symbol then there must be the @ symbol followed by at least one, but likely more. Then there is more alphanumeric characters and at least one period mixed in there. That's what that long somewhat cryptic regular expression means.

Before I actually start mailing to anyone I need a script that I can link to inside every opt-in mail list email to allow subscribers to easily and automatically unsubscribe from the list. In some places, due to the rampant abuse of spammers, I believe there is legislation which requires such a link, so an ounce of prevention might be worth a pound of cure. If you actually clicked the unsubscribe.php3 link above you will see that it does nothing. That is because when I create the mail out script I will have PHP embed in each email the proper id number (see the unsubscribe.php3?id= above) to actually activate the script to remove the email from the database and print a message saying removal was successful. This is called using a query string to input data into a script. It is an alternate way to input information into a script instead of using forms and quite useful for situations like the one outlined here.

I am going to use a loop to send the mail instead of simply separating the cc email addresses by commas so people on the list cannot use what I think is an abused mail function "reply to all." You could easily alter the code below to not use a loop to send mails out. I'll leave that one to you to do if you want that option with your mail list.