How to make a notifiy subscription list?

Question

I have my site under construction, and I want to have a little form (name, email) where people can submit it to be notified when I launch my site. Much like you see on Beta invite sites etc. How would I go about that?

Answer 1

Have a HTML form with single email field. Name is not required and therefore should be avoided.

On database side, create a table with two fields: one to store email address and one boolean flag field (default false) to save status (if the notification is sent to this address or not). Make email address a unique field.

Two scripts:

1. To save form entry to the database table. Basically a form handler.
2. To select N email addresses and send a notification email to these. Then on successful completion of dispatch update the flag field against the email address to true. N is the upper limit of emails that your ISP allows during T time.

Make a cron job entry to run the mail sender script after every T units of time.

Answer 2

in some situations the pear Net_SMTP class can be useful

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dam

Answer 3

Thanks a bunch! Though I honestly do not know what a cron job is. :) Any chance you can explain that a bit? Thanks!