Open Newsletter

Author: Anthony E.
chovy@users.sourceforge.net
See Screenshots
Notes

Project Status:

5/16/01 - Currently the first release is in development, demo version should be available by 9/01
News Archive

Public Description:

Open Newsletter is a web-based open source solution for sending email newsletters to a subscriber list.

Email delivery options include an HTML version and/or a Text version. Currently, the software allows for maintenance of four separate newsletter distribution lists.

Administration features include:

  1. Subscriber database statistics for the following: date, type - text/html, newsletter version(s) subscribed to.
  2. Admin functions include update, delete, add, and searching (by email) the subscriber database
  3. Recipient has the choice of plain-text or html-embedded newsletters (multipart/alternative mime 1.0 compliant)
  4. Recipient can unsubscribe from list simply by clicking on an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of an email newsletter.
  5. Sending an email newsletter to subscriber database via web-interface (by cut and paste of HTML and Text versions into a form).

Currently, Open Newsletter has been tested with (but is not limited to) a userbase of 20,000 recipients.

Technical Description:

Open Newsletter is a web-based open source solution for sending email newsletters to a subscriber list.

Email delivery options include an HTML version and/or a Text version. Currently, the software allows for maintenance of four separate newsletter distribution lists.

The web interface provides administrators with statistics on subscribers, including newsletter version(s) to which people are subscribed, and newsletter type (text or html). Administration functions also include the ability to subscribe/unsubscribe & update user records in the database, in addition to sending the email newsletter.

The subscriber database is stored in a mysql database, with fields including email, date subscribed, type (text/html), and version(s) subscribed.

The web-interfaced is a CGI script written in perl that interacts with the mysql database for administration of subscriber list and sending the email newsletter.

Unsubscribing feature is implemented as a link at the bottom of every email which passes the users subscribed email address to a separate subscribe/unsubscribe perl script. The users email is deleted completely from the database.

The email delivery is accomplished by the perl CGI script using Sendmail.

Server Requirements for Open Newsletter:

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