I toss this hack/proposal out to our PHPList community in the hope that it will generate interest in what I see as an important and necessary change. If there are enough people interested in this approach I will continue work on it.
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These are the problems that I am trying to solve with these hacks:
1. Requests for confirmation resulting from user imports and from Reconcile Users are sent at full speed rather than throttled.
2. I can find no way to have separate confirmation requests for users subscribing to a particular list. (Some of my lists are unrelated to each other).
3. I want to be able to choose the users to send 2nd and 3rd requests for confirmation and use different messages for different situations.
4. I want to be able to include a request to confirm in my normal HTML newsletter mailing-- but only send that version to those who have not confirmed.
Currently, using PHPList, when your ISP chokes on the mass of confirmation messages not only does it stop sending them but I can find no record of which mailings went out and which did not. If you attempt to use the Reconcile Users option you may send multiple requests to confirm to your users--very annoying for them. And these are also sent out at full speed resulting in some of them failing.
IMHO, rather than adding throttling to the system messages, it is better to send large numbers of confirmation messages as normal messages, not as system generated ones. That way they are throttled, are fully customizable, and can be part of a full HTML newsletter. This is a change of a fundamental strategy built into PHPList. But we coould pull it off simply with three changes:
1. Import has to allow imports without confirmation AND without automatically sending the system confirmation request.
2. Messages (a.k.a. newsletters) have to be able to include the full confirmation url link-- with the user's unique ID.
3. Messages have to be able to be sent to unconfirmed users-- but not too easily and not inadvertantly.
The hacks are pretty simple if you ignore internationalization. (I hard coded the English user interface text). The 3 changes above are confined essentially to 3 files, importcsv.php, sendemaillib.php, and processqueue.php, respectively.
To keep these posts a little more readable I am breaking the topic into 5 notes, this one, one for each of the files hacked, and a summary.
Please look this over and try it out. Or, just give me your thoughts. I am new to PHPList. Others may look at this and say, been there, done that, and this is the reason it is a bad idea. I tested it on v2.10.5. It works great for me but be carefull. As they say, "back up your files". And, "your milage may vary".
