[Pro] Send Form limit / Menu List field

I want the ability send an email to a few or all of a list of 100 email addresses.

I can have a menu list of about a dozen or so, but when I try to have a list of 100 I get the error message “The value contains too many characters.”

Any way to accomplish this?

Thanks


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If you are doing this using the trick of adding a comma-separated list of addresses to the To field, then you’re going to hit a couple of issues very hard: privacy, and deliverability.

Privacy: assuming that all of these people on the list are close friends, and already have all of those addresses in their in-box, privacy is not an issue. But if these people don’t know each other? Or don’t want their address slurped into Gmail for the greater good of Google’s ad-bots? That’s something to think about. It’s basic netiquette that you don’t send a message to a group by concatenating a list of a hundred addresses like this.

If you do this trick using the Bcc: header, then you are in effect sending a single message to each person on the list. This is still not optimal behavior, though, because the message will not be apparently addressed to each person on the list. They will get a message addressed to some neutral third party (I often send to myself to do this) and they won’t see that they were Bcc’d unless they have that non-standard header exposed in their mail software.

Now deliverability: this type of construction is a hallmark of spam messages sent by unsophisticated Windows bots, and is likely going to end your message up in the Spam Box of Shame for a large percentage of your addressees. It just looks fishy and will either be flagged at the ISP or mail host level, or at the desktop level in Mail.app or whatever else they use.

The very best way to handle this number of addressees is with a mailing list, like the one you’re reading this on. Most hosting providers include the Mailman list processor in their basic cPanel installation. It’s a bit opaque to set up, but it’s been around for as long as the Internet (way before the Web) itself, so there are tons and tons of how-to articles to help you get it configured. Once you do, sending a message to 100 people is as easy as addressing it to one person – the list. If you don’t want to worry about Mailman, you may be able to cobble something together with MailChimp, which has a much friendlier interface. A free account at MailChimp can handle a ridiculous number of messages per month, although you have to multiply this by the number of list members. If you wanted to send out 100 messages at a time from an open Web form, this could get expensive if your form becomes popular. Mailman is cheap, and has digest subscription options, so rather than each person getting one message per form submission, they could subscribe to get them only after a period of time (once per day?) or after a number of messages have queued up.

Walter

On Jan 24, 2014, at 12:30 PM, Jim Roselli wrote:

I want the ability send an email to a few or all of a list of 100 email addresses.

I can have a menu list of about a dozen or so, but when I try to have a list of 100 I get the error message “The value contains too many characters.”

Any way to accomplish this?

Thanks


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options