I'd like to see an improved mass email interface that includes HTML content and other features to make professional looking mailings to members.

Oh my gosh YES!!!! Why vBulletin hasn't addressed this, I don't know....but mass email management is a HUGE need. We do a monthly newsletter and this is a huge issue for us.

How are each of you doing this now? We usually create our mailing list as an export out of vBulletin then import into Constant Contact. Otherwise if we need to send out a notification to a given group of product owners (ie - Vendor Tools) then we use the built in email by usergroup functionality.

While I can't say we'll build anything in this space I have some experience in this area and I would like to hear more about what your need is.

Thanks!

Mark

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Mark Ferguson
President - Drive Thru Online, Inc.
Drive Thru Online – Helping Turn Your Passion into Profit

Mark - Our user database sits at almost 12,000 users so constant contact won't work for us as it's extremely cost prohibitive for mail out numbers as large as we have.

Right now, we send out we send out our newsletter in two, painful ways:

1. Via Private Message. This is somewhat "preaching to the choir" as it does a good job of communicating to our active users, but not at all good for reaching less active users or users who haven't visited us in a long time.

2. I (by hand) reformat the PM version of the newsletter to a text file, and just use the "email all members function" in the Admin CP. We've got no way of tracking any stats on these emails, and since we don't comply with mass email guidelines, I suspect that we may be getting blocked at the ISP level on many of the emails we send out.

If you're using Constant Contact, then you know what we need in terms of functionality.

I see. That's a lot more complex than what I did even when I was reaching out to our 45K members. For this many members I didn't use Constant Contact but instead went to PM only distribution. I did this for a couple of reasons:

- richer formatting of the message
- no opt in/out was needed since the message stayed within the confines of the service I was offering
- no blacklisting would happen
- it would generate email based notifications for the majority of our users so even if they haven't been on the site in a while it would entice them back on if they were still interested (Note: for registration options I always had email notifications set for private messaging as the default)

The only problem we ran into with this approach was that even with some modifications I had made to a bulk private messaging tool (this was back on vB 3.6.1) it would load the system quit severely and would sometimes fail at some point before making it through the entire user population.

To build something that would offer tracking, PM and email versions from the same content, etc. would be pretty involved but would offer some good flexibility over what is currently offered in the stock vBulletin functionality.

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Mark Ferguson
President - Drive Thru Online, Inc.
Drive Thru Online – Helping Turn Your Passion into Profit

That's not a bad approach, and one that we're basically using - we using an enhanced PM function as well.

If you search threads on vBulletin's site, you'll see there is MUCH interest in a mass email module - I think it would sell well if you built it.

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John Holbrook
Owner, WATCH TALK FORUMS
www.watchtalkforums.info

I never have a shortage of ideas to pursue If I only had enough hours in the day and ability to easily reach the masses of vBulletin site owners since vb.org doesn't allow any promotion for paid products

__________________
Mark Ferguson
President - Drive Thru Online, Inc.
Drive Thru Online – Helping Turn Your Passion into Profit