First off, how many users are you talking about? So what would the largest batch of emails be?
We fairly specifically don't try to be a mailing list app. That's a very specialist application. We provide "best effort" delivery to "tens" of users, not hundreds. We don't provide any delivery reports (beyond displaying warnings about failed deliveries at form submission time), we don't handle bounces, etc. I'm not saying Fabrik is unreliable at mail delivery, simply that we don't provide any of the additional features a dedicated mailing list application would.
That said, as long as you aren't talking about hundreds of recipients in any given batch, and if you use a reliable SMTP relay, we do a good job of small scale delivery.
To answer some of your question:
Testing is difficult; there needs to be a way to see who's getting emails as a result of to: eval code without actually sending the emails and asking them if they got them.
Well, it's eval'ed code, so it's easy enough to log your own results. You could create a table ('mail_log') and before returning your list of comma separates addresses ...
Code:
// your code that set $myEmail (or whatever), then ...
$myDb = JFactory::getDbo();
$myQuery = $myDb->getQuery();
// you could insert things like the formid and rowid as well, but at a minimum, time and addresses
$myQuery->insert('mail_log')->set('emails = ' . $myDb->quote($myEmails))->set('date_time = NOW()');
$myDb->setQuery($myQuery);
$myDb->execute();
// for testing, just return a test address ...
return 'test@test.test';
Then when you are happy, start returning $myEmails to actually send them, and leave the logging on if you want.
- In trying to use Joomla 'groups', it appears that if a group has parents and the recipient is a member of the child and a parent, two emails are sent out.
I'll have to check that, not something I've noticed, but it could be happening.
- The emails that are received do not have the cc:s listed in the 'Reply to' list, so it's hard to initiate a conversation among/between the group. It's simply an email blast rather than the start of a discussion.
We send the emails individually, one delivery for each user, we don't send a single email with multiple To or a Cc list. That's something we could add as an option, and I could include in a quote.
- I have no idea how to make the form screens look elegant. I'm sure there are ways, but my knowledge of HTML is primitive and CSS nearly non-existant; much less how to make it happen in Fabrik.
There is full templating available, but it does require some knowledge. I personally don't do that ind of work, as I'm focused on the nuts and bolts of functionality. But
@mediaateam have some resources they can provide to do that stuff.
So, let me know about the numbers, and we'll go from there.
-- hugh