Setting up a newsletter for REVO

Last week I was looking for a native solution to setup a newsletter and after many hours of searching I found out that there’s no too much info about it because there are only two components for newsletter or similar functionality. I tried DitsNews that has a few bugs and you have to send email through a cronjob which personally don’t like and EmailResource that couldn’t get to work. Yes there is a tutorial but it’s not a detailed one, so if you are a beginner, good luck.

Anyways, so far the only solution and the best one is Chimpx. Why? Because bulk emailing is harder than it looks. If you're going to send a lot of emails, and you want them to get through, you need to set up: Reverse PTR records, DomainKeys, SenderID, and Bounce handling (https://forums.modx.com/thread/70011/newsletter-module-with-html-contents#dis-post-393544).

Installing the Chimpx (http://modx.com/extras/package/chimpx) component can take you five minutes. Setting up MailChimp can take you a little more because you have to setup an account and tweak a few things around but not big deal. MailChimp is a paid service but it has an option called Forever Free which let you send 12,000 emails per month to 2,000 subscribers and the paid ones are affordable. If you don’t have any idea about how to set it up, don’t worry, they have a bunch of videos, forum, etc. on how to get it to work, it’s easy, believe me. After all this you just copy and paste a little code to any of your pages or resources and you are done. Also, you can translate these forms to many languages.

MailChimp is an incredible app and VERY intuitive, you don’t have to read a manual to get it to work. I hope this help because it took hours.

I'm sorry you had trouble with EmailResource. I've rewritten the tutorial to (hopefully) make it easier for others. In doing so, I discovered that I left out some key information.

I second your recommendation for MailChimp. EmailResource does work well with MailChimp once you figure out how to use it. I'm not familiar with ChimpX, but I'm glad it's working for you.

Again, sorry for the confusion.

@ BobRay (or anybody else who knows it)

You say that "EmailResource works well with MailChimp once you figure out how to use it".
Is there any more information about that? What are the steps in order to integrate EmailResource and MailChimp?
Any suggestion would be much appreciated.

Thaks a lot,
Pietro

Basically, you set up your account at MailChimp. They give you an email address for what, IIRC, they call "Email Beaming" (no idea why they call it that). You set up EmailResource to send a test email of the email version of the resource to that address, then you go to MailChimp and send it to your users.

All user and bounce management is done at MailChimp.

FYI, there is a version of EmailResource due out soon that does bulk email to MODX User groups. It's still fairly crude, will eat a a fair amount of memory during the send, and might time out or violate the host's rules on sending bulk emails (though it does have batch size and between-batch delay settings). I think it would be safe to use for lists with a few hundred users, but it's never been tested with larger groups. It does make a nice log file for each send, but there's no log "viewer" as yet.

I'm hoping it will be released in the next few weeks. The version after that may be refactored as a CMP rather than a plugin, which should make it a lot more convenient to use, but it may be quite a while before that happens. That version should also have a nice Ajax/jQuery progress bar for the send.


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