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Users Manual

Target group: Editors

Sending bulk email requires careful planning, you should check very carefully the content and formatting of your newsletter and the recipients who you intend to send it to. It is very easy to accidentally send unsolicited emails with this extension to numerous people. The developers of this extension take no responsibility for your angry email recipients.

Please think very hard what you are doing when using this tool, once emails have been sent by the system it is near impossible to recall them.

Having said that, it is very important to make small test sends of your newsletter to your own email address to proof your work before you schedule it for final delivery.

Give yourself enough forward scheduling time. If you schedule a newsletter it may be possible to stop it before it has been sent. If you spot a problem quickly advise your Administrator as soon as possible as they probably have the ability to stop the mails.

Sending your first newsletter

  1. In TYPO3 Backend, in list mode. Create a new RecipientList (eg: http://www.example.com/typo3/alt_doc.php?edit[tx_newsletter_domain_model_recipientlist][1]=new)
    1. Pick a few BE-users
    2. Save
  2. Select the module “Newsletter”
  3. Select the page you want to send as newsletter
  4. On the tab “Newsletter > Status”, check that there is no errors
  5. On the tab “Newsletter > Settings”, enter the name and email of the sender
  6. On the tab “Newsletter > Sending”
    1. Select a RecipientList
    2. Select the time when the Newsletter will start sending
    3. Click on the button “Add to Queue”

The newsletter will be sent via the Scheduler task at the time it was planned, or, for testing purpose, you can manually trigger the task within Scheduler. Statistics are available as soon as a newsletter is queued. So it is possible to check what’s going on.

Writing a newsletter

Newsletter should be ‘self-contained’, meaning not linking to any external resources except for images. CSS may be included inline but with limited support (see http://www.email-standards.org and http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css).

Markers substitutions

Simple substitutions

The extension Newsletter offers markers substitution in newsletter content. Any fields available via RecpientList will be substituted in content if found. There is three alternative syntax for markers:

  • ###my_field###
  • http://my_field
  • https://my_field

The last two variants are convenient to create hyperlink with TYPO3’s RTE.

By using the SQL RecipientList, we can select several other fields to personalize the newsletter with recipient’s name, address, private generated links or anything else needed.

In addition, the extension ‘Newsletter’ provide two built-in markers:

  • ###newsletter_view_url### URL to view the newsletter in a browser
  • ###newsletter_unsubscribe_url### URL to unsubscribe from the newsletter (will register a bounce with type NEWSLETTER_UNSUBSCRIBE)

Advanced substitutions

You can also use the fields as a boolean evaluation. If you write the markers like this:

###:IF: my_field ###<p>Bla bla bla</p>###:ENDIF:###

The <p>Bla bla bla</p> will only be shown if the “my_field” field evaluates to true in PHP. You can also make an else-branch:

###:IF: my_field ###<h1>Foo</h1>###:ELSE:###<h1>Bar</h1>###:ENDIF:###

This can be useful to present different content to different recipients.