Dear DBMAN Users,

Well, I have been working on improving the Mass Mailer for quite some time now...Thanks to one of you who sent me an Amazon gift certificate, which I used for the book,"Advanced Perl Programming", I have finished the next upgrade....earlier than I anticipated.

PLEASE keep in mind that this is another BETA release and I will not be submitting it to the Resource Center, until enough people have successfully installed it on their servers.

WARNING...While the script is fairly easy to set-up, you will have to have some Perl knowledge at least how variables should be set-up to use this script. Please limit your critical remarks until you have tested the script for yourself.

This upgraded script offers the following:

1) Security: The script creates an encrypted password that you will use to access the script in the future.

2) Web Administration: You can edit the Subject line and Message via easy-to-use web forms.

3) Confirmation Screen: A confirmation appears with a list of email addresses that you sent your message to.

4) Subscription: Subscription to this Mass Mailer program is done through DBMAN and web forms within it. You will have to add an additional field, something like ReceiveMail or JoinList. This should be a YES or NO field that DBMAN users can select to either receive mass mailings or not.

5) Flexible Mailing Methods: I have included flags/toggles for you to choose between SENDMAIL and SMTP. This has not been 100% tested. If you use SMTP, you will need the Mailer.pm module from LINKS to make this script work.

NOTE: The $mailfooter text file that is appended to each email message does not work with SMTP. I don't know why. I will be testing this further.

Tests:

This script has been tested with the following server specifications:

a) Perl 5.004 and 5.005
b) UNIX server
c) Apache 1.3

Download:

You can download the script at the following web address:

anthrotech.com/cgi/dbman/mods/webmailer/webmailer.exe

This is a self-extracting file that should be downloadable on most systems. This file includes the following files:

a) webmailer.cfg - script
b) webmailer.cgi - config file
c) README.txt - instructions

Why is this a separate script and NOT integrated into db.cgi or html.pl??

For many reasons, but the most important being flexibility to allow non-administrators, but who are managers of organizations to send out email messages to users in your database.

Also, from past experience...giving codes to insert into the DBMAN files has proven to be a nightmare. While there is redundancy in codes, in terms of date routines and cgierror, this script is easier to set-up than editing your db.cgi and html.pl files.

Welp, that is it. Hope you guys and gals like it.

Regards,

------------------
Eliot Lee
Anthro TECH,L.L.C
www.anthrotech.com
----------------------

Hi Eliot,

I just set it up and it seems to work quite well.

A couple of things I had to change to make it work:

1) I was getting an internal server error at first. This is from the error logs:

3) This one is nit-picky, but it might trip someone up... In webmailer.cfg, you wrote:

# Example:
# $cgiurl = "http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/dbman/mailer.cgi";

Howevever, the script is webmailer.cgi, so someone might follow the example blindly and not be sure why it's not working.

All in all, it looks quite good! I'll continue to play around with it, but it appears to be perfectly functional. Thanks!

Dan

That's strange, I got an internal server error while trying to post this message. But it posted anyway, and I ended up with a duplicate message....


[This message has been edited by Dan Kaplan (edited February 19, 2000).]

Thank you for the constructive feedback...I will edit the files soon.

Some points of clarification....

1) About the Sendmail/SMTP configurations and if conditional statements...Did you set ONLY sendmail variables in the .cfg file?

2) About the $cgiurl...the reason I set this so that people can EASILY edit this variable, rather than having to go into script and edit the FORM lines in the codes.



3) I will double check the HTML, but I am sure that there were closing table tags, since I tested this script in three versions of Netscape...which is less tolerant of HTML code errors and also two versions of MIE...but I will look at the script and make the appropriate changes.

Thanks for testing and providing feedback...helps me to make it more useful for DBMAN users (who don't know a thing about Perl).



BTW...I, too, received an Internal Server Error when posting this reply..I did not refresh the script...so only message was sent..



Regards,

------------------
Eliot Lee....
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[This message has been edited by AnthroRules (edited February 19, 2000).]

Hi Eliot,

Regarding the the Sendmail/SMTP, I left the SMTP variables commented out in the .cfg file. I tried uncommenting the $smtp = 0; line, but I still got the internal server error.

I think it was the second set of "closing" table tags that was missing, at least in the version I downloaded. That's why I posted it in nested form -- to make it a little easier to follow visually.

Dan

Well, I will look over the codes again for the SMTP and Sendmail conditional statements.

Thanks.

BTW: I do not like using too many nested tables in my demo and modded scripts, because some users have problems deleting the nested tables if they don't want to use them...so, I tend NOT to use them in Mods I write...But again, I will look over the codes and see what I can come up that is amicable to all levels of users.

Thanks again for your feedback.

Regards,

------------------
Eliot Lee....
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I have made the changes Dan mentioned. The problem with the loop in the SMTP codes was that for some reason SMTP does not support insertion of external files into email messages. I don't know why...but that is the problem I found...So, I simply deleted the loop...it should work fine now.

Thanks again, Dan, for checking out the script and testing it.

Regards,

------------------
Eliot Lee....
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You're welcome. Glad it wasn't my error, or even worse my imagination! I'm surprised no one else has commented on it. Surely others have put it to use???

Dan

Well...I will still want to work on it a bit to include the mailer footer for SMTP before releasing it.

I don't know what the deal is...may be people are satisfied with using the Mass Mailer v.1.0 that can be automated with Cron to send out messages to users.

Regards,

------------------
Eliot Lee....
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