Sending a mass email with individual details

[darylr]

Hi all,

Im looking to send an email to all inactive accounts on my website with a unique ID code for users to re-activate their accounts through the provided ID.

Basically, my table (users) has a name and email field and in a seperate table (activekeys) I have a unique, random ID for all users. I want to be able to send all the users an email that will include their re-activation ID so they can renew their account.

Im not sure the best way to go about this as Ive only ever used the basic mail script. Would an array work, and how would I go about that as Ive never used arrays before? :bemused:

Thanks for your help,

D

[nickdrums]

I'd say you want to do a select with join from the two tables, assuming that the userid is a common field between the two tables?

Once you have this result set, just step through it like this:

$result = mysql_query($query);

[set up a template for the email you want to send, into which you can drop fields like the user's name and unique id]

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
use str_replace() to drop in your user fields
use mail() to send your email
}

Hope this helps.

[sneakyimp]

If by 'table' you mean a database table, you'll need to run a query to fetch each email and its associated random id. not sure why you put the random ids in a separate table.

This code assumes you are using MySQL as your database technology. This may not be the case. I'm also guessing what your database fields are. That said, this code will probably not work for you but it should show a possible approach.

// YOU WOULD NEED TO PUT CODE TO CONNECT TO YOUR DB HERE

// this is an SQL query to fetch your emails with their associated random IDs
$sql = "select u.email, a.randomID from users u, activekeys a WHERE a.userid=u.id";
// this runs the query
$result = mysql_query($sql)
  or die('query failed');
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
  $email = $row['email'];
  $randomID = $row['randomID'];

  $activate_url = 'http://yourdomain.com/activate.php?id=' . $randomID;
  $mail_message = "To activate your account, please click this link:\n" . $activate_url
  mail($email, 'Important Account Message from yourdomain.com', $mail_message)
    or die('mail failed');
}

Then you need a page, activate.php which does the re-activating or whatever.

[darylr]

Hiya,

Thanks for the reply.. Ive never sent mass email that way so am having a bit of problem. My code below is just sending everyone an email with the ID but without selecting it from 2 different databases. Can you tell me where Im going wrong? The page is plain blank when I submit the form on the previous page.

// YOU WOULD NEED TO PUT CODE TO CONNECT TO YOUR DB HERE
require_once('../Connections/REAV.php');
// this is an SQL query to fetch your emails with their associated random IDs
$sql = "SELECT id, name from emailtest";
// this runs the query
$result = mysql_query($sql)
  or die('query failed');
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
  $email = $row['email'];
  $randomID = $row['id'];

  $mail_message = "To activate your account, please click this link:\n activate.php?id=$randomID"

 $headers = "FROM: [e-mail]";
 $sub = "Important Message from mydomain.com";

  mail($email, $sub, $mail_message, $headers);
} 

[sneakyimp]

Daryl, my code has nothing in it that would output any text at all. Also, you might want to disable the mail() command when you are testing or you'll end up sending a lot of broken emails to all your customers.

Your query only mentions one table, emailtest. The 'random' id is not random at all but the actual id from the emailtest table.

You might want to try reading up on the basics of PHP and/or queries before you take on something like this. It sounds like you know very little about this sort of thing.