PHPlist 2.10.3 review
DownloadPHPlist is a mailing list and newsletter manager that allows posting via a Web page
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PHPlist is a mailing list and newsletter manager that allows posting via a Web page. PHPlist works well when used for announcements, and can handle very large email address lists. Users can sign up to multiple lists, but will only receive a single copy of cross-posted messages.
When signing up, users can identify their geographical location, and messages can be targetted to these. You can add place holders in your email that will be replaced with personal details (such as the person's name).
Users can update their own information, and unlike many other mailing list systems, they can change their email address. HTML emails are supported.
Here are some key features of "PHPlist":
Posting to the mailinglist is via a webpage. It is therefore a one-way announcements system, directed from you to your audience.
It is designed to be able to deal with a very large amount of email addresses. If a sending fails halfway, the next process for sending simply continues where it left off, without duplicating emails to users.
Users can sign up to multiple lists. If a message is sent to multiple lists, they will only receive one copy of the email and not as many as the number of lists they are subscribed to.
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.
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.
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.
Repetition. A message can be repeated automatically. Currently this is only useful when the message has "filesystem attachments", because they are refreshed at time of sending.
User management. You can use several in built tools to handle large databases of users. Users can be reminded to confirm their subscription and invalid emails will be found automatically, or fixed whenever needed.
Bounce handling. Bounces can be processed and users will be automatically unsubscribed when too many emails to them bounced. This can be corrected by the administrator in case the unsubscription was incorrect.
Automated PDF creation. To ensure users can read the message regardless of mail reader, the message can be automatically converted to PDF and attached to the email.
RSS feeds. PHPlist can be set up to read a range of RSS sources and send the contents on a regular basis to users. The user can identify how often they want to receive the feeds. For more information about RSS click here
Easy install. Just copy the files to your website folder, tell the login details of the SQL database and it's done.
What's New in This Release:
Some major bugfixes were made to further stabilize the code.
Upgrading is highly recommended to fix several XSS vulnerabilities.
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