[drupal-support] mass mailer says can't fine php executable even though it's in /usr/bin/

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

On Mon, 30 May 2005, Eric Scouten wrote:

> Petre Scheie wrote:
> > I installed the mass mailer module, and can create messages, but no
> > messages are being sent out.
>
> Petre,
>
> I encountered this problem about a month ago. Sadly, I never solved it.
>
> I think you're headed for a lot of pain using PHPlist and the mass
> mailer module. IMHO, PHPlist is very poorly documented and fairly buggy.
> (I'm clearly not alone in this perception. Google on "phplist" or
> "phplist (swear word)" and you'll find a lot of unhappy users.)
>
> The instructions for mass mailer module were not so great either.
> Specifically, they didn't make it clear where to install PHPlist so that
> the Drupal integration would work properly. I spent a few hours fiddling
> with two seemingly likely answers and neither one worked. (See support
> request at http://drupal.org/node/21637, filed a month ago, still
> unanswered.)

I've never installed phplist, but I've spoken to Aaron Welch (the
massmailer developer) and he said that phplist would be fairly stable. I
think many people must be using the massmailer, too, as it is shipped
with civicspace.

> I eventually gave up and installed Mailman (www.list.org) instead.
> There's no integration (yet?) with Drupal

Mathias and I have been working on it and I can say that it was a most
royal PITA.  Since mailman uses some python constructs for storing its
data, it cannot interface directly with PHP or MySQL and we needed to
resort to screenscraping to get the info we needed. We got it somewhat
working, but lost interest afterwards.

An alternative solution would be to execute the commandline tools that
come with mailman from php, but this solution doesn't appeal to me
either.

> and it isn't quite what I
> wanted (PHPlist's feature set is much closer to what I need), but ...

What would probably be fairly easy (compared to Mailman) would be
integration of Sympa (another mailing list programm). It stores its
data in mysql, too, and the data could thus be manipulated from within
Drupal.

If I'd get some funding, I'd work on it.
I've been meaning to set up a reverse bounty for this, but haven't
figured out how to do that yet.

> Mailman is a very mature piece of software and I was able to get it up
> and running quickly and easily, despite my complete lack of Python
> skills. :-)

Mailman has its own issues, believe me. Om occassion some mails with
multilingual content still get stuck in the queue for example.

Cheers,
	Gerhard