List Mania - Thu, 11 Feb 2010

Since the Version 0.99.7 release a few days ago, I have been trying to set up the Newsletter again. That died even before I switched web hosts, because the mailings started canning out after about 500 were sent.

I needed something more robust, and after the change to a PHP/MySQL backend on the new Behold website last year, the logical choice seemed to be the Open Source mailing list program: phplist.

Phplist seemed to have what I needed: The ability to send out a large number of mailings, batch sending and throttling, html/text newsletters and bounce management.

But gawd - it has the most horrendous user interface with no thought to managing the users or the mailing lists themselves. And to make things worse, my Netfirms account limits the capabilities of phpmyadmin so just getting my current user list into phplist took me 3 days of puzzle solving.

But its almost there. Hopefully I’ll be able to send out the first Newsletter in the next few days, and then get back to moving Behold closer to version 1.