Mailshot pointers / advice

[turtleton09]

I've done a website in the past for an employment agency, that can match candidates to jobs - ie they find candidtates that match certain jobs based on keyword or description, to bring up a list a of candidates.

They're now asking about a mailshot type thing, whereby from that they can mail most easily mail each candidate in a search result details of the job.

This is a new area to me - I imagine there are numerous solutions, but wonder if anyone can give me pointers / advice as to how best achieve this.

Cheers.

[nemonoman]

[man]mail[/man]
Loop through the email addresses returned by a query, then send an email to each

[turtleton09]

nemonoman wrote:

[man]mail[/man]
Loop through the email addresses returned by a query, then send an email to each

Thank you - just having a look through that - but my design rather than coding background makes it all look a bit more complicated than it probably is.

I understand the principle of the sendmail thing, but unsure exactly how to implement it in this scenario.

From the search results page, how would the user than send the emails? Have a 'send email' button than runs a .php page that sends the emails?

[nemonoman]

Yes. You'd create a form with a submit button. The form "ACTION" would be the name of the php file that knows how to handle the information.

You would either know and remember the query that produced the email address results, and replay it to send the e-mail, or you would load the email addresses into one or multiple input variables on the form page. You'd probably include form elements such as "text-to-email" and 'name-email-of-sender' etc.

When the "SUBMIT" button is clicked, your form iwll activate the "ACTION" file, and pass the information in the form of $_POST variables. Read the variables, then send emails to as required.

It is slightly complicated, and if you don't know what you're doing, this is NOT the place to start. Get a basic feel for the method with a tutorial to 2.

[turtleton09]

That makes sense.

So if I have a simple form, literally :

<form action="sendemails.php" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" name="send_email">
  <p>Send emails </p>
  <p><input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit">
  </p>
</form>

And a sendmails.php page that does all the processing, by being passed the records from the results page?

I've used send mail before in a contact page, but just sending one email with code like :

$emailTo = '"mycompany" <[e-mail]>';

$emailSubject = "Enquiry from website";
$emailSubject = preg_replace('/[\x00-\x1F]/', '', $emailSubject);

$emailFrom = "$FTGemail";
$emailFrom = preg_replace('/[\x00-\x1F]/', '', $emailFrom);

$emailBody = "First name : $FTGfirstname\n"
 . "Last name : $FTGlastname\n"
 . "\n"
 . "Telephone number: $FTGtel\n"
 . "Email address : $FTGemail\n"
 . "\n"
 . "Enquiry : $FTGmessage\n"
 . "\n"
 . "Preferred method of contact : $FTGRadioGroup1\n"
 . "\n"
 . "\n"
 . "";

$emailHeader = "From: $emailFrom\n"
 . "Reply-To: $emailFrom\n"
 . "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
 . "Content-type: text/plain; charset=\"ISO-8859-1\"\n"
 . "Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit\n";

mail($emailTo, $emailSubject, $emailBody, $emailHeader);

So do I just need to add some code to loop (a while loop?) through the records? That's the part I'm unsure of the syntax?