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Thread tagged as: Question, Forms

Sending emails from the admin interface

I'm just looking for a bit of advice here before I start developing this simple project for an annual charity event.

The functionality they require from their site is to be able to maintain a small list of around 100 email addresses and to email them all about twice a year as well as to be able to email subsets of this list perhaps another 2 or 3 times a year. It seems that mailchimp might be overkill for this (and also requires them to send their email via a third-party service) so I wondered if this is something that's possible to do entirely within the forms app.

Is it possible to write and send an email from the admin interface and to send that email to each address on a list that has been populated by the forms app or is this something best achieved with another service like mailchip or with a different app (members)?

Owain Browne

Owain Browne 0 points

  • 3 years ago
Simon Clay

Simon Clay 127 points

Hi Owain,

It's not possible with the Forms App, or Members App. You'd need to write your own app to perform that function.

There are other CMSes that will do this, but personally, as you've mentioned, I'd use a service like MailChimp who are geared up not only to send bulk quantities of emails (I know we're only talking a hundred), but also has great reporting on who opened the email, when they opened it, etc, as well as good database/member/subscriber management.

Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

Simon is right - sending email is a specialist task best left to services designed for it.

Thank you for your replies and the advice. I’ll work with Mailchimp in that case - especially given that forms can be sent to two apps when submitted. I also think that the way Mailchimp maintains a masterlist with tags rather than sublists will work well for their requirements (they want a list of people to email each year but then sublists of people who have signed up for a specific year and maybe even child subcategories within that year).

I guess I just tend towards a bit of control freakery when I start a project (which probably is why I liked the idea of perch originally when I first started designing simple sites with CMS) though my instinct that the client might find Mailchimp a bit off-putting and/or beyond their needs is possibly valid. I think learning the ropes of Mailchimp is therefore my first task with this project.

If I could flag a feature request for the Mailchimp app I would say that the ability to send a templated email from the admin interface in perch would have made it a no-brainer for this project for me.