Can the Bolt "Simple Forms" extension be used to send data? - php

My Bolt site lists a lot of events. Can I use the Simple Forms extension to email a list of events to a visitor?

Yes you can, but I would advise against it - a better way would be to use a real mailinglist (mailchimp or campaignmonitor are great for mailinglists)
The problem is that you create an open relay for spambots with a simpleform that is used as a place to send anyone mail - it is meant to be used as a contact form where visitors can send messages to the site owner
If you still want to use it to send visitors a list of events - you can look at the "use_as" parameter for emailfields in the documentation.

Related

Creating a custom webmail - What should i be aware of [INFRASTRUCTURE]?

I'm trying to create a custom webmail, for one of our products, that has thousand of users.
We would like to create the webmail by our own, and let the user sends it by his/hers personal email (One that they already have, and is created)
I know that HubSpot CRM has something like that, but i don't know what i should be aware of, or how i can do it.
I know there I's a lot with spam, reputation etc, but i need some guidance. Can anyone help me out?
It could be awesome to do it with SendGrid integrated.
Kind regards
You may start using a open source webmail client like Roundcube or Rainloop. You can customize the client and use any third party MTA, or just use your current MTA in your own server.
If you want something more advanced, you could pipe all emails from a domain to your custom application and handle everything internally.

How to create a Post by Email system?

Like Wordpress and Blogger have. For example, I send an email to something_blog_post#myblog.com and the email that I sent would be transformed in a post on my blog.
There are services like mailgun that make this fairly easy to do since they convert inbound email into API calls.
The alternative is to find a way to poll IMAP with PHP, then parse the messages. This is probably a whole lot harder.
There are several solutions to this problem:
Firstly, you can setup a system to poll an existing IMAP or POP3 system and return the result.
You can setup an email server which will call a script itself upon receiving an email.
You can use a third party provider (such as CloudMailin or MailGun).
I wrote a blog post a little while back outlining some of these options for Rails applications but they all apply directly to PHP too.

Email relaying with php | craigslist's anonymous email generator

I wanted to create (or at least learn/know how it is done) application(or configuration?) that does similar to what craigslist does when people choose to hide their email with the "anonymous" option when making posts. I suspect that it is done with what's called email relaying. I'd like to find out how it is done in process - from when user enter their email to receiving an email via an anonymous email address. I come from a "LAMP" background at an intermediate level so please bear with me and kindly explain.
Your responses/comments/suggestions/pointers are greatly appreciated.
Thank you
The easiest way to do this is to receive email with your php app. There are a wide range of ways to do this, collecting using cron, piping from an email server directly into your app or using a third party like CloudMailin.
I wrote a blog post explaining some of the methods you can use to receive incoming email using php here. The post discusses rails but the principals are the same for most languages and frameworks.

Is it possible to use the Google Apps API to send a message content via POST to a PHP page elsewhere?

Is it possible to create a gmail gadget with a button that would send a message's sender, subject, date and content via POST to some PHP page?
If so, any clues as to how this could be done?
I have been asked to integrate this as part of a small CRM, not sure if it can be done.
Thanks!
Contextual Gadgets might cover what you need, alternatively you could fetch the messages externally using the Mail feeds.
In either case, you will need to be authorised either via the Google Apps Marketplace or directly from the domain administrator by setting up OAuth credentials.
It's highly unlikely; the emails are considered private, no gadget should have access to them.

How can I create an email newsletter by taking objects from a database?

Well, I'm trying to create a newsletter, that will send emails to users in a database. The newsletter itself would draw "events" and other activities from a database. Whats the best way to take that list, and put them in an email? I was thinking about putting them into an html page, then sending an html email, but not all emails support html(like school email). What would your guys recommend? Could you point me to some good resources?
Also, this is for a school project, so I cant use any open source type stuff, unfortunately :(
You are correct in your assumption that if you are creating html newsletters, you will also have to do a text based version for clients that don't support html or ones that ask to have e-mail be sent only in text. You will need to make sure your code sends both versions to recipients. You could also ask the recipients for their preference and send them the specific version that they requested.
For html e-mail it is highly recommended to read the following two articles by CampaignMonitor (they specialize in e-mail marketing sofware):
HTML E-mail Design Guidelines
Guide to CSS support in email
clients
Note that I am assuming you are asking for help with the actual construction of the html for the email not the code needed to create and send the newsletter.
Good luck with your project.
==== UPDATE ====
So it seems that you actually need help in developing this project. Since this is a homework, I will provide some general advice that should steer you in the correct direction and get you started on the project. Then, if you have any specific problems with your code, you can ask about them on Stackoverflow.
There is really two things that need to be done here:
In PHP, dynamically contruct a variable that contains the html or text versions of the e-mail that needs to be sent.
Loop through your contact list and e-mail the contents of that variable.
Sending E-mail
I will start with the sending e-mail portion, because the links provide bellow also show you how to construct the message. Also, in your comment you said you already know how to contruct an html from a database. The following links show you two ways to send e-mail. You can either use the Mail function that comes with PHP or download the PEAR_Mail package. If you are allowed to use additional libraries and want to send html e-mail, I would recommend using the PEAR_Mail, because it makes things much easier if you want to send a both an html and text version of an e-mail together.
Note: To send an e-mail you will need to use some sort of mail server. If you are using Windows, you can install the SMTP service that comes with IIS or you can use an external smtp service such as google to send your e-mails.
http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_ref_mail.asp
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php
http://www.webcheatsheet.com/php/send_email_text_html_attachment.php
http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.php
http://pear.php.net/package/Mail_Mime/docs
Construct E-mail
The complexity here will depend on whether you just want a plain text e-mail or html. For either case you will need to read the event data from your database and add it to the message that you want to send.
Some Seudocode:
Loop through datarows
message = DataRow[EventDate] + " " + DataRow[EventName] + "\n"
Loop through recipients
mail message
Hopefully this gives you a start. I would recommend getting php to send out an e-mail of a static html or text first. Once you have that code working you can start working on adding the functionality of reading event info from a database and sending it out.
Hope this helps.

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