Forcing BCC: when e-mailing

Thanks Chris,

Which I guess brings me back to the core issue here, which is a way to force the sender to use BCC instead of either of the other options and exposing the entire e-mail list.


Jerry

Does anyone know of a mail client which can help prevent these kinds of mistakes?

I know Gmail has a Forgotten Attachment Detector which has saved me some embarassment.

Hi Chris,

I’ve actually found some programs that force a BCC:

http://www.ablebits.com/outlook-blind-carbon-copy-bcc-email-addins/index.php

and the one mentioned above by flamerz

http://www.xellsoft.com/TurboMailer.html

I have nothing against using an 3rd party program, I was just hoping to incorporate all the functionality into CMSB.

All of these 3rd party programs rely on other external programs: Internet Explorer, Outlook or Outlook express, etc. for some of their functionality.

When implementing these solutions, there are sure to be issues of clients not having IE, or not using outlook and other restrictions that I’m sure will pop up on the client side that I was hoping to sidestep.

I think that the biggest issue will be creating an mailing viewer template that is secure, that can send batches of e-mails without the web server timing out and having data persistence issues, that gives the sender reliable information about success and returned e-mails, and that works.

I don’t necessarily see a major issue in attaching viewer generated HTML code to this viewer, but I’m sure that the devil will be in the details.

Just under example 4 in a post on http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php
that dealt with sending HTML email with mail(), there was a mention of http://pear.php.net/package/Mail_Mime

I really wish that I understood more about all of this.

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Just some thoughts. Every organization deals with this issue and it might be a beneficial plugin for all.

Thanks again for all you do for us.

Best,

Jerry Kornbluth

Hi Jerry,

>I really wish that I understood more about all of this.

Basically, you can send the email from the server or the desktop (be that a browser, outlook, or some other desktop email program).

If you send it from the desktop (also called the client) then we don't have a lot of control over what happens. All that we get to do is hope the list of emails gets sent or copied into the right place in the desktop program and everything works as it should.

Software differences or bugs, user error, and many other issues can affect the outcome. Different internet providers may throttle or limit outgoing email in different ways. And unless everyone uses the same mail program different desktop programs will format and send emails according to their own standards.

On the server we can make a program to do whatever we need, including hard-coding it to only BCC users or send a separate copy to each user. If a users email is in the To: line it often have more luck getting through the spam filter.

There's still the issue of volume. If you're sending a couple hundred emails you're probably fine. More than that and you need to watch for PHP script timeouts and other issues that may interfere with the outgoing mail. Web hosts have their own limits of outgoing mail as well.

On top of this, each email client that receives an html message formats it differently. See:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/entry/677/image-blocking-in-email-clients/
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/

There's technical documents called RFCs that (are incredibly dry reading) and describe how it all works. From a technical perspective you can put anything you want on the from, to, and cc lines (bcc never appears) in the same way you can put whatever you want in the subject. Behind the scenes the email addresses that the message is sent to are unrelated to that. So I can, for example, send you a message from bill.gates@microsoft.com in a few lines of PHP.

So there's no blanket solution. If you want to build something I'd start by trying to create a viewer that puts HTML into a variable and then mails you (just you) that html. If you can get that working right then you can add some code to load all the emails and loop over them mailing each one. It will take a bit of experimenting, though.

So there's some background on how it all works. Hope that helps! :)

Dave,

Thanks for the input and explainantion.

I guess there's lots more homework to do.

Best,

Jerry

I need to be able to send an email blast to registered users (members). Surely there is a simple way to accomplish this from within CMSB, especially with the Membership plugin? Most Open source CMS's do this, why can't CMSB? I would think that this should be part of the core.

Hi affinitymc,

So far the easiest approach that I've found is to set up some list viewers that create e-mail address lists based on various criteria using where statements and simple if statements.

Then I've copied and pasted the resulting email address lists into the BCC: field of the e-mail.


In another approach I created some spiffy looking eblast viewers and then emailed those using the File>send>page by email function in IE 7 or 8 and the BCC: field.

There's a post of mine just today (Using an absolute URL in PHP "require" and "include") where Chris describes how to encrypt any e-mail addresses in the body of the email using the CMSB spambot email protector addon.

All of this is documented in my CMSB Cookbook http://www.thecmsbcookbook.com

I've been thinking that some of the code in the emailOnApproved plugin might help to send the e-mails directly from CMSB.

That said, I really like the eblast viewer template approach, and the extra few steps are pretty quick.

Hope some of this helps.

Jerry Kornbluth