On 17 Aug 2005, at 12:38, Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
BTW: The fact that massmailer was so buggy seems to indicate that the demand for massmailing beyond user_mail()'s capabilities is maybe overestimated. ;->
I think rather that it is more complex and therefore not accessible to hobby Drupalists.
True massmailing (as in tens of thousands of mails) will _never_ be available to hobby Drupalists with el cheapo hosting.
Why?
- technical difficulties - any sane webhoster will deny sending mass mails to cheap customers for fear of getting blacklisted.
And if you just need to send a few hundred mails, you probably will do fine with user_mail() and a cronjob.
True, and that is probably what the default/initial backend should look like. Right now, all these modules implement their own "cronjob + user_mail" function. Let's make this available as a service. In addition we could provide a centralized way of dealing with HTML mail, a mechanism to throttle the rate of outgoing e-mails, a mechanism to convert HTML mails to plain text, and - in future - maybe a mechanism to track and report back bounces. As you said, proper mailing is hard. Hence the need to make this a specialized service and to extract this from the individual modules. Hence my call for people with experience, or for people willing to learn more about this. I don't expect this to be implemented overnight, but it would be nice if some people could explore our options, see what other projects have done, prototype some code, etc. -- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/