Mailing List from Frontpage

George · Sep 30, 2004

I have about 75 persons that belong to an association whose web site I
manage. I would like any member to be able to send an email to something like
"[email protected]" and the site would maintain the current set of emails
for all members (both work and other emails they wish to submit). I use Verio
to host the site on a Win 2003 server (Bronze shared hosting). How would I
approach this?

Rick Budde · Sep 30, 2004

When you say "the site would maintain the current set of
emails for all members", please define this a bit better.
What will be done with the list? Who needs to see it? How
will they use it? How frequently will it be updated? Will
the organization numbers grow greatly?

For instance, do you wish the current list to be viewable
by all members at any point in time?

If so there are several ways to go about this:

1. you could write some code in whatever language your
host supports (ASP, PHP or whatever) to program what you
want to happen, or
2. you could use Front Page's Database wizards to collect
and display the data, or
3. with the relatively small membership, you could use a
more manual approach. Have the members email you their
address or changes to their address (use a mailto
hyperlink) and then manually post them to a webpage
containing a table listing name and email address.

Or is this list just for the secretary of your
organization so that he/she can send out periodic emails
to association members? Then I would suggest using
approach 3 above.

In deciding which approach to use, take into acount how
much effort it will take to do it programmatically versus
manually.

I hope this helps.

George · Oct 1, 2004

Rick,

Thanks so much!!

I actually have done #3 by posting on the site a Members List page in which
association officers and key members can download an Excel file, swipe over
the email column, and then paste into their Outlook To: box a list of about
75 email addresses. Sadly, almost none of my non-technical members can do
this... So I even added a Notepad file with just the emails in one long line
for those w/o the ability to read Excel. The trouble is that even if they
might do this on Sept 1, but then keep using the same Outlook message (e.g.,
using Reply) or going to their Sent Mail folder and using it as the base for
another later email. But they miss all the intervening email changes that I
take care of keeping up to date. I was "naively hoping" I could set us a
mailing list module inside my site (Frontpage Add-in for example) and then
tell my users to simply send email to [email protected] and my site
would receive the email and then forward it to all members using the most
current email addresses. Then they would never have to even know about the
email addresses. Doggone if I can find this Add-In. Forwarding, as I have
uncovered with Verio and some other ISPs, only let's you forward to one
address and not a list of addresses. I don't get this limitation since what I
wish to do is likely what many folks would also want to do.

I tried to find an alternate ISP to Verio that might have this built in
without much luck; I did find, for example, www.pair.com with support for
"Mailing Lists" (using Mailman 2.0) but I suspect it is not for the simple,
non-programmer Frontpage user like myself.

If I did setup an ASP page to receive an email from outside sent to
[email protected] is there a template on the web to show how this page would
be programmed that I could follow; presumably getting the email addresses out
of a database on my site (e.g., Access) and executing the mailtos? It would
need to handle attachments.

George F.

Rick Budde said:
When you say "the site would maintain the current set of
emails for all members", please define this a bit better.
What will be done with the list? Who needs to see it? How
will they use it? How frequently will it be updated? Will
the organization numbers grow greatly?

For instance, do you wish the current list to be viewable
by all members at any point in time?

If so there are several ways to go about this:

1. you could write some code in whatever language your
host supports (ASP, PHP or whatever) to program what you
want to happen, or
2. you could use Front Page's Database wizards to collect
and display the data, or
3. with the relatively small membership, you could use a
more manual approach. Have the members email you their
address or changes to their address (use a mailto
hyperlink) and then manually post them to a webpage
containing a table listing name and email address.

Or is this list just for the secretary of your
organization so that he/she can send out periodic emails
to association members? Then I would suggest using
approach 3 above.

In deciding which approach to use, take into acount how
much effort it will take to do it programmatically versus
manually.

I hope this helps.

Thomas A. Rowe · Oct 1, 2004

What you are looking for is either a pre-design ASP based solution or a custom written ASP base
solution for membership management.

See
http://www.ycoln-resources.com/resources/asp/news.asp?id=31&parentID=1

--
==============================================
Thomas A. Rowe (Microsoft MVP - FrontPage)
WEBMASTER Resources(tm)

FrontPage Resources, WebCircle, MS KB Quick Links, etc.
==============================================

George said:
Rick,

Thanks so much!!

I actually have done #3 by posting on the site a Members List page in which
association officers and key members can download an Excel file, swipe over
the email column, and then paste into their Outlook To: box a list of about
75 email addresses. Sadly, almost none of my non-technical members can do
this... So I even added a Notepad file with just the emails in one long line
for those w/o the ability to read Excel. The trouble is that even if they
might do this on Sept 1, but then keep using the same Outlook message (e.g.,
using Reply) or going to their Sent Mail folder and using it as the base for
another later email. But they miss all the intervening email changes that I
take care of keeping up to date. I was "naively hoping" I could set us a
mailing list module inside my site (Frontpage Add-in for example) and then
tell my users to simply send email to [email protected] and my site
would receive the email and then forward it to all members using the most
current email addresses. Then they would never have to even know about the
email addresses. Doggone if I can find this Add-In. Forwarding, as I have
uncovered with Verio and some other ISPs, only let's you forward to one
address and not a list of addresses. I don't get this limitation since what I
wish to do is likely what many folks would also want to do.

I tried to find an alternate ISP to Verio that might have this built in
without much luck; I did find, for example, www.pair.com with support for
"Mailing Lists" (using Mailman 2.0) but I suspect it is not for the simple,
non-programmer Frontpage user like myself.

If I did setup an ASP page to receive an email from outside sent to
[email protected] is there a template on the web to show how this page would
be programmed that I could follow; presumably getting the email addresses out
of a database on my site (e.g., Access) and executing the mailtos? It would
need to handle attachments.

George F.

George · Oct 1, 2004

Tom,

Thanks!!

I looked at the references you provided. Can you name two that you think or
know might have the largest market share of users in an application role that
I discussed?? I am not asking for a recommendation. Otherwise, I am unable to
penetrate the highly-technical jargon of the various toolsets and offerings
that are listed....

Thomas A. Rowe · Oct 1, 2004

I haven't really looked at any of the solution offered, as I would write my own code if I need to do
what you want.

--
==============================================
Thomas A. Rowe (Microsoft MVP - FrontPage)
WEBMASTER Resources(tm)

FrontPage Resources, WebCircle, MS KB Quick Links, etc.
==============================================

George · Oct 4, 2004

Tom,

One more approach. I actually tried to load the list of my members 50+
emails directly in the mailto command by editing the HTML directly and it
worked! In other words I could click on the link and it would launch Outlook
with all 50 emails in my "To:" box. Now I would like to store the email list
in a text file inside the same folder (e.g., "Email Llist.txt" whose content
is just a string of semi-colon-separated emails as in: [email protected];
[email protected], etc.) and reference this in the mailto command as in
somthing like mailto:<#include file="Email List.txt">. Do you know the syntax
for this in Frontpage 2002 using Verio as an ISP (with support for FP 2002
extensions)?

George

Thomas A. Rowe · Oct 4, 2004

George,

I am not aware of any way to do this with the mailto link. However any method that actually has the
email address visible on the web site, allow spam robots to harvest the email addresses.

The best approach is a server-side solution which could use a database or text database to read and
loop through the list of email addresses.

--
==============================================
Thomas A. Rowe (Microsoft MVP - FrontPage)
WEBMASTER Resources(tm)

FrontPage Resources, WebCircle, MS KB Quick Links, etc.
==============================================