Features

Viewfinder Mailing List has the following features:

  • Handles a large number of recipients
  • Support for numerous mailing lists
  • User admin and access levels for administration
  • Mailing templates
  • Automatic archiving of sent emails
  • Save emails
  • Build emails using templates, previous sent or saved emails
  • Support for embedded or linked images
  • Easy upload images to the server
  • Remote capture of hosted images to be embedded
  • Reports on sent mails
  • Ability to review and delete mails in the mail queue
  • Custom fields to store whatever data you wish to collect
  • Open tracking of HTML emails
  • Import and export of mailing lists
  • Delayed sending
  • Throttled sending
  • Tags to allow user data to be entered in email (such as first name)

Requirements

In order to run Viewfinder Mailing List you need to install it on a web server with a connection to the internet and a mail sending ability. The server needs to have PHP version 4.3.7 or higher (it may run on lower but this has not been tested) and MySQL version 3.23.49 or higher installed. You must also have the rights to create a database though it can use and existing one. In order to send email you need to be able to create cron jobs or have access to some sort of scheduled task processing. Another option is to use pseudo-cron.

Wish list/Roadmap

Here are some of the things that need looking at or adding:

  • Underlying code needs a serious clean-up
  • Allow different types of custom field
  • Better error handling
  • Handle incoming ‘bounce’ messages
  • Improve the preview screens
  • Add more reporting, add graphical displays
  • Add custom queries so users can query specific fields
  • Paginate the list display page
  • Allow export and list display pages to work/display along with a query
  • Allow queries/filters to be used in sending