CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

I've been investigating and integrating CiviCRM for a few weeks and must say that it is impressive in many ways.

One thing I haven't done is install civimail but I must admit to not trying to hard on that front. It seems a bit complex to install whereas there are mail alternatives that are very easy. The one I am thinking of is swiftmailer which is a very nice PHP mailing class and all you really need is your own STMP (or a gmail account). Alternatively just integrate the contacts list into mailman or similar. There is also a nice newletter component in Joomla called Acajoom News which I am sure could be easily modified to work with the Civicrm tables.

Also I am slightly puzzled why there is no CiviSMS since a lot of the NGOs I work with use bulk SMS more than email. Of course again we could download the contacts and upload then to the bulk sms server. I know of http://mysms.joomlacoder.de/ which is a joomla module that allows sending SMSs via a number of providers and I have first used a written PHP scripts to send bulk emails or WAP Pushs (hidden content links) from provider APIS.

So I think my questions are -

Is anyone using anything for mailing aside from CiviMail and has anyone considered a CiviSMS addon

Actually, I believe that there's active development happening in a couple of places on CiviSMS.

http://www.legalconsult.com.au/ have put a lot of effort into getting CiviCRM + SMS together (not sure if this is labelled CiviSMS or a separate project).

Someone else mentioned on IRC in the last few days that they have a working CiviSMS. Not sure if it will be rolled into 2.1, it may have come too late for the alpha a few days ago.

CiviMail is not that scary if you take the "alternate installation" route which is well documented and fairly easy to set up (much simpler, IMO, than the official route). The integration with CiviCRM is well worthwhile to have bounces and email updates handled automatically.

When we transferred one client's lists (~20K contacts), it resulted in a huge (mostly automated) cleanup of non-working addresses which had remained in the previous system due to the extreme workload that would have been required to handle bounces immediately. This is a very important benefit of using a tool like CiviMail which integrates well with the core CRM.

That said, we still have about 200 mailing lists in Mailman for the same client, and will look to methods of integrating the two tools in future. I expect our announcement lists will move to CiviMail, and the discussion lists will remain in Mailman.

Hey there,

You might want to contact the author of that extension directly and point them towards this forum post (not sure if they look on these forums on a regular basis).

You should also probably start a new post with an appropriate subject line, etc., rather that continue this one from 2008