Mailing Lists: PHPlist

PHPlist is a double opt-in newsletter manager. It is written in PHP and uses an SQL database for storing the information. PHPlist is software that runs on a server. PHPlist is designed to assist you to stay in touch with your audience, without flooding them with information they don\\'t want. PHPlist is an essential tool for anyone who is serious about creating, capturing and maintaining an offline audience, and will help you increase traffic to your website. And the most amazing thing of all: IT\\'S FREE.

Some PHPlist Features: 

• Open Tracking. You can see how many users opened your email. This is a rough indication, as many mail readers do not allow this, but it can still be quite useful.
• Click Tracking. You can enable tracking all clicks of all URLs in the emails you send and PHPlist will report on the clicks on every single email. This can be viewed by message, URL or user
• Send a Webpage. Just tell PHPlist the URL of a webpage you want to send to your users and it will fetch it and send it out. You can even give the URL some user specific parameters that will fetch a different URL per user.
• Templates. It is very easy to adapt the public pages of the system to fit into your website. You can upload a header and a footer of all pages to make the pages fit your requirements.
• Attributes. You can specify information you want to get from users when they sign up. When sending a message, you can use this information to select the users that need to receive the message. For example you can add geographical information. When people sign up, they can identify the geographical location they're in and when sending an email you can determine which locations need to receive the message.
• Multiple subscribe pages. You can design your own subscribe pages and you can have different pages allowing users to sign up to a selection of your lists and only enter a selection of your pre-defined attributes.
• Personalisation. You can use the attributes you define in the emails you send, to make every email personal to the user who receives them.
• PHPlist supports HTML emails. If a user indicates they want HTML email they can receive it that way. If unknown the system has a bias to send text emails to users.
• There is a choice of which HTML editor you want to use in order to create your emails. These editors are pulled in from other open source projects that specialise in clever HTML editors.
• Multiple List managers. One Super user can assign lists to multiple list managers, who can control their own pool of users and lists. The Super user can "prepare" messages that can be chosen by list managers to send to any of the lists they control.
• Easy import and export. Use TAB delimited files to import your existing list of users or to export the users on the PHPlist system for use in your in-house database.
• Personal Details. Every email a user receives will contain a personalised URL to update the users' preferences. This way your users can update their own information and your database is always up-to-date. Unlike most other mailinglist managers users can change their email address when updating their personal details. This is a major benefit to both you and your users as many people often change their email address, and this feature makes sure that they don't disappear from your view.
• Attachments. You can add attachments to your message. They will be included in the HTML emails. The users who receive text will get a special URL mentioned in their email telling them where to download the attachment from your website.
• Batch Processing. To facilitate shared hosting environments, you can specify the maximum number of emails to send in a time period you identify. This can also be overridden by ISPs who can set these values server wide to apply to any PHPlist installation on that machine.
• Set up Throttling to make sure that the load on your server does not become excessive so it halts
• You can also use Domain Throttling to make sure that you don't send too many emails to one domain within a certain time frame and get very unfriendly with the system administrators of the receiving domain
• ISP Friendly. Apart from the limit on values for batch processing that the ISP can enforce, there is an additional option for ISPs to suspend sending during busy times in the day.
• Embargoed sending. You can create a message and tell the system to only start sending it at a certain date and time in the future.