Civimail Mailinglist subscription

[Simon147]

Hello all,

It took me quite some time to really figure out how to set up a double opt-in mailinglist. Here I try to summarize what I gathered from different forum posts so far. Could some CiviCRM-god check if this is all right (and maybe this text can complete  this text):

Create a mailinglist subscription form:

• Activate Civimail (Administer -> Configure -> Global settings -> Enable CiviCRM components)
• Create one or several groups (called for example "Newsletter subscription 1", "Mailinglist 2", ...
• For these groups, choose "group type" = Mailinglist and "visibility" = Public pages
• Go to Drupal "permission" site (yousite/admin/user/permissions) and give permission to all users, particularly anonymous users to "access CiviMail subscribe/unsubscribe pages"
• On [yoursite]/civicrm/mailing/subscribe?reset=1 you should now be able to find the form where people can sign up on all your (public) mailinglists.
• If you want to have one seperate form for every list, use [yoursite]/civicrm/mailing/subscribe?reset=1&gid=X where X is the ID of the group.

Add additional fields
If you want to collect additional data from your subscribers (like first name, last name), you have to proceed as follows:

• Create a new profile with the corresponding fields for the date you want to collect
• Set "used for" to "Profile"
• You don't need to select any groups in "Add new contacts to a Group?", but you necessarily need to add the e-mail address here.
• Set the visibility for all these fields on "Public Pages"
• If you want, you can include a captcha. To do so, you have to activate it in the "advanced settings" where you can configure additional options. Generally, it doesn't make much sense to add a captcha to a public mailinglist.
• As for the "Drupal user account registration option?", it is in most cases not necessary/useful to have a Drupal account created, so you may check the option "No account create option".
• And for the "What to do upon duplicate match" and "Proximity search", I don't have too much of an idea yet (can anyone recommend something here?)
• You have to create at least profile field "email address" and a field "groups" where people select the lists to which they want to sign up.
• In Drupal, you have to give the permissions "profile create" and "profile listings and forms" to "anonymous user" (if you have other profiles and listings where the access is restricted, you have to create a more fine graned access control with ACL.
• Once your profile is ready, your signup form is available under [yoursite]/civicrm/profile/create?reset=1&gid=X where X is the ID of your profile

Include that form on your webpage
If you don't want to have this form showing on an individual page, but on your frontpage, follow what is written here.

Note:
It seams that this works only with "groups" and not with "smart groups".

Question:
Only problem now: If the sign-up happens through a profile, there is no double opt-in and people don't receive a confirmation e-mail they have to confirm (or where they can sign out again). Any idea how to make this work? 

[Donald Lobo]

a few comments:

1. If you dont need a listing, dont give anon users "profile listings and search"

2. It is safe to use "create new contact" and skip proximity search in the settings

3. profile add to group skips the double opt-in step (due to popular demand from the community). We might be getting this back as a setting, check this issue:

http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-7465

4. Whenever a profile adds a contact to a group its always as an entry in the group_contact table and not via a query search (which is what smart groups are about)

lobo

[Simon147]

Is there a way to preserve the double opt-in, but still add additional fields to the mailinglist sign-up form?

[Donald Lobo]

in 3.3 no.

hopefully we'll resurrect this in 3.4 via a setting across the entire site (as the issue specifies)

lobo

[Simon147]

For everyone searching info about how to set up a newsletter registration form: You find the description of a more up to date possibility for this here.