Mailing List Feature Question

influx

Hey all,

I am offering users at my blog site the ability to enable a mailing list for their account. When doing so, they will be able to send mass e-mails to their subscribers, but I want to add a small footer sentence with text saying "If you would like to remove yourself from this mailing list, click here".

How would I, right below their mail message (that they input in a text field), add this to the message?

Here is my mail() code:

mail($email_add, $subject, $message, "From: ".$email_address);

Thanks!
-influx

laserlight

Well, why not concatenate it to $message?

leatherback

Just before your mail:

$message .= "If you would like to remove yourself from this mailing list, <a href=\"LINKHERE\">click here</a>";

lth2h

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.assignment.php

I'd try something like

$message .= "Blah Blah Blah"

influx

Laserlight: What do you mean concatenate it just to $message? meaning, I do something along the lines of:

$final_message=$message.$footer_sentence;

Also, I have looked around for using HTML in e-mails, and I don't mean to finesse my e-mails with images and what-not, I was just wondering if it's a better idea to use anchors in a mass e-mail (i.e: <a href="http://www.link.com">http://www.link.com</a>) or do most mail clients automatically convert them to anchors? Should I bother with using anchors for links or just write the links and hope the mail client converts them?

laserlight

What do you mean concatenate it just to $message? meaning, I do something along the lines of:

Yes. leatherback's example also works.

Also, I have looked around for using HTML in e-mails

If you provide HTML emails, you should also provide the option of plain text emails. In such a case, you are safe using the anchor tags for HTML emails.

influx

If I am not using HTML e-mails, just text-based e-mails, how would I add line breaks for the footer sentence?

Here is the code I'm using:

$message .= '\n\n\nIf you would like to remove yourself from this mailing list, click (or copy and paste) the following link: www.test.com;

The \n's don't add line breaks, they just show up as "\n"

Weedpacket

I think most major email clients recognise URLs in plain text emails, and will convert them to links for display (and may provide the option to the user whether to have it on or off). To make it more reliable I'd suggest using a genuine URL instead of just a domain name, e.g., http://www.example.com/ - and try to phrase the comment so that you don't have any punctuation immediately after the URL (just in case it gets mistaken for part of the URL).

Drakla

influx wrote:
The \n's don't add line breaks, they just show up as "\n"

You have to put \n inside double quotes for it to be interpreted to real linebreaks. If you want to use html + plain text emails take a look at

http://phpmailer.sourceforge.net/

As it's great. PEAR also has a mime mailer, but the sourceforge version has more features.