Thread: How to setup a mailing list capture form?

Can anyone tell me the quickest, easiest, and cheapest way to setup an email capture form that is connected to a service that lets me manage weekly or daily mailouts to subscribers, and how do I do this without having my email address/url blacklisted.

I prefer free options, mostly because the mailing list will be for proxy site users, which might of course mean needing to change the sending email address quite regularly to get past filters.

Any thoughts?

Might have a look at http://www.phplist.com/ then for a form field on the proxy its self can search for a php email subscription script to find a basic one. Then if all your site are on the same server they can all add to one database. If you use phplist could probably get one of these mysql gurus to make the two work together so you dont have to import the list in to.

I was planning to use until I actually started getting the admin panel made and a email system was added to the admin area. So with some luck that script will work as it looked promising.

That looks like a fantastic mail manager, thanks.

At the moment I don't run my own servers, all of my hosting is on shared plans, and the hosts I user at the moment are very strict on sending emails through the server, I've even had to disable comment announcements on one of my g/fs sites.

Do you know of any good (and free or cheap) hosted mail list managers?

Sorry to bump this; I've been looking at all the free options available, including phplist which can be installed on my own host account, and paid services such as AWeber, but I don't know which is going to suit my needs the best, and I don't really want to pay $20 a month to run a proxy mailing list.

Here's what I want to do. On each of my proxy sites I want a simple form with name and email address, and after the user has subscribed I want to be able to login to a page that let's me send a message.

Sounds simple, but every mailing list manager I look at seems to offer more than that and don't explain how easy it is to dumb down the process. The only service I've seen that shows me a service similar to what I want is bravenet but they don't give very many details, and I don't know what type of advertising they include in messages.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Here is another alternative you can try

Simple Mailing List

• Easy subscribe/unsubscribe integration with any web page.
• Optional email confirmation to the user upon subscribe/unsubscribe.
• Optional email updates to the list owner upon subscribe/unsubscribe including current member count.
• The ability to schedule mailings for a future date.
• The ability to throttle/limit/queue messages so as not to overload your host’s mail server.

For Wordpress I suggest you try Subscribe2:
Subscribe2 Plugin

It's a fantastic plugin.

Originally Posted by elbandelero

Sorry to bump this; I've been looking at all the free options available, including phplist which can be installed on my own host account, and paid services such as AWeber, but I don't know which is going to suit my needs the best, and I don't really want to pay $20 a month to run a proxy mailing list.

Here's what I want to do. On each of my proxy sites I want a simple form with name and email address, and after the user has subscribed I want to be able to login to a page that let's me send a message.

Sounds simple, but every mailing list manager I look at seems to offer more than that and don't explain how easy it is to dumb down the process. The only service I've seen that shows me a service similar to what I want is bravenet but they don't give very many details, and I don't know what type of advertising they include in messages.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Well, the way I see it there is three things you could do:

A. Give bravenet a shot
You might as well find out what is sent with there messages, just send one to a spare email account(make sure it's not used for anything else as this could also be a good test to see if "spam" somehow gets sent to it ).

B. Keep looking
Sure, it may take longer to find something but if your not happy with something, why settle for less? Also, I recommend that you check out what Mr.Bill posted, as that pretty much looks like a little more advanced then what you asked for free script.

C. Code one your self OR hire someone code the script that is right for you.
It sounds like a pretty simple job really, anyone that has had some experience with mail(), mysql and a few other things should be able to write a script like that(Doesn't mean they will be able to secure it but it's still there).

Personally I would try all of the options that I listed above.

MaxBlogPress have just released a MaxBlogPress Optin Form Adder.
I don't know how good it is but I used some other plugin from them and they are very good

Originally Posted by A12Alex

A. Give bravenet a shot
You might as well find out what is sent with there messages, just send one to a spare email account(make sure it's not used for anything else as this could also be a good test to see if "spam" somehow gets sent to it ).

OK, tried them, wow after just a few minutes I decided they weren't for me. Biggest problem was that after subscribing they default back to their own homepage instead of a thank you page that I control.

B. Keep looking
Sure, it may take longer to find something but if your not happy with something, why settle for less? Also, I recommend that you check out what Mr.Bill posted, as that pretty much looks like a little more advanced then what you asked for free script.

Yup, discovered that PHPList comes with Fantastico so it was easy to setup, and even though it isn't 100% what I want at least I can control the mailing list completely. Next thing I need to do is figure out how to style the form, or better yet, put the form on each of mt sites.

C. Code one your self OR hire someone code the script that is right for you.
It sounds like a pretty simple job really, anyone that has had some experience with mail(), mysql and a few other things should be able to write a script like that(Doesn't mean they will be able to secure it but it's still there).

If the list works for me, then I may very well have to look at this option ut I think I'm many months away from even needing to think about it.