Switch from Simple Machines forum blast to CiviMail for newsletter

[Michael McAndrew]

Hey there,

What are the blockers for switching from the forum blast to a proper CiviMail newsletter? Would be good to get them out of the way and switch over.

And get a good newsletter design in place and make a lot more of our monthly mail-outs.

It seems that whenever someone creates an account on one of out multiple authenticated systems, if they are not subscribed to our newsletter, we should ask them if they want to be.  I am guessing it wouldn't be to write an extension that checks and fires out a subscription email if they aren't.

Re: getting shed loads of spam in CiviCRM, I'm pretty sure we can put a process in manage the proliferation of contacts (e.g. 'remove people that were added to CiviCRM from the forum, but did not subscribe to the newsetter after 1 month').

What about the 'sending to known spam accounts is bad for your image / makes you look like a spammer argument' that I think I have heard before? Anyone know if this is a real issue? How can we circumvent it?

Michael

[JoeMurray]

I would recommend sending from CiviMail via a service like MailChimp that does whitelisting for us.

[Erik Hommel]

I concur with Joe (and accept he knows a hell of a lot more about this than I do  ). It is a good idea though, it would be much nicer to have a sexy newsletter going around instead of the forumblast. And I think that if we do use MailChimp we should be allright.

[Donald Lobo]

This comes up periodically. A few thoughts:

1. We need a volunteer to help do the initial migration and then set up a sync job between the forum registration info and civicrm (via the API obviously!). This is a 5 - 20 hour job.

2. We should use CiviSMTP and/or a third party SMTP service rather than a mailing service (like MailChimp). Eating our own dog food gives us incentive to improve and make CiviMail as good if not better than MailChimp et al (from a front end perspective)

Any takers?

lobo

[Michael McAndrew]

a volunteer for this would be awesome. would be good to have in place and tested before the end of this year

[Dave Greenberg]

I suspect Joe was referring to MailChimp's Mandrill SMTP service - which might be a good option. However I think CiviSMTP would be our first choice.