Question Question On How To Build Mailing Lists

[highlander]

First to explain why I purchased this mod. I have been looking for a way to send a newsletter to my forum base. We have over 21,000 members at this time. VBulletin has a built in feature that allows you to create a list of addresses based on a set of criteria. It's pretty flexible. The problem is that their email functionality puts everybody's email address in the "TO" vs "BCC" field. As a result, my first venture into a broader forum communication resulted in a bunch of email addresses being "leaked" in a mass email to about 500 users.

I bought this mod with the hopes that I could build and maintain email lists for groups of users - primarily to send out forum updates - while not compromising the privacy of our members email address. Some things I had envisioned doing:
- For members who have joined in the last six months, send them monthly updates of new threads that have been created; to pique their interest and get them to return
- For members with over a certain post count, send communication about a particular item that may be of interest to them
- For all forum members, send a mass email communicating some important things.

My problem is that I can't figure out how to create these lists with VBMail. How can I do it? it looks like I need to build the lists one member at a time. We have 10 - 15 new members joining per day and as I said, we have over 20k members.

 

[Fillip H.]

You cannot build the first two mailing list types in vBMail.

For the "all forum members" one, simply create a new mailing list and tick the "Default Subscribed" tickbox next to the usergroups you wish to subscribe to the mailing list. If you include your "new registered members" group in this list, they will automatically be subscribed when they join the forum.

 

[highlander]

You cannot build the first two mailing list types in vBMail.

For the "all forum members" one, simply create a new mailing list and tick the "Default Subscribed" tickbox next to the usergroups you wish to subscribe to the mailing list. If you include your "new registered members" group in this list, they will automatically be subscribed when they join the forum.

Thank you.

Question - are these all sent out as separate emails and do I never have to worry about the email address leak problem that I described above?

I think if there was a way to allow more flexible creation of mass mailing lists, it would greatly increase the useability of the mod.

 

[highlander]

Fillip H. is there a way to populate the list with existing members automatically or can only new ones be added? I tried checking the boxes you mentioned and only new people that are joining are being added

 

[Fillip H.]

Thank you.

Question - are these all sent out as separate emails and do I never have to worry about the email address leak problem that I described above?

I think if there was a way to allow more flexible creation of mass mailing lists, it would greatly increase the useability of the mod.

That's correct, it's entirely separate emails

The emails are powered by vB's mail queue, so in the front-end when you see it sending emails it's actually simply queuing them to be sent by vB's cron job, for performance reasons. Each email is 100% individual and no addresses are exposed in any way

Fillip H. is there a way to populate the list with existing members automatically or can only new ones be added? I tried checking the boxes you mentioned and only new people that are joining are being added

This does work if you create the mailing list afresh and you're not seeing the warning box above the mailing list. The warning box would alert you that there's a problem with your php.ini configuration, and would prevent the usergroup permissions form from showing.

Currently, the mod can only retroactively subscribe users that match the "Default Subscribed" tickbox when the list is first created, to avoid conflict with users that have unsubscribed.

 

[Fillip H.]

As this ticket has received no further replies, I'll close it.

If you have any other issues or questions, please feel free to start a new support ticket