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Is trying to create my own Autoresponder series seem reasonable?

by Ghoro
2 replies
Currently what I want to do is use a 3rd party SMTP, going with Mandrill for now, and using the Mandrill API I want to wright my own Autoresponder series for my wordpress to run on my shared hosting. I would think the best way would be with cron jobs that run PHP scripts, but if there is a better way please let me know. Because I will be using Mandrills API, I believe it will handle the more complicated aspects like tracking opens, bounces, delivery, spam complaints, unsubscribes, just about any type of action and so on, I just need to call the API to get the information.

After that just logically thinking about it seems like it would be pretty straightforward and won't take a huge amount of time to setup, just need to store things like email, date they sub, IP, location and then send out emails based off when they subscribed and of course removing them from the list when I get any spam complaints, unsubscribes or bounces. Only laying out the bare bones to get it started, would want to store more information down the line to help separate them into other lists or to send them different offers.

At this point I only have a little experience with PHP and web development over all, but I have a lot of experience with desktop apps, mainly with C#, Java and SQL. So mainly I'm just wondering for anyone that has already done anything similar or just have more experience in this area if this is maybe a lot more complicated then I think or if there are any traps I may run into? Any security problems that could be a lot of work to deal with? Of course any good resources or examples you may know of to help out would be greatly appreciated.

While of course I could easily buy one of the many self-hosted Autoresponders already out there, I'm hoping down the road to just have more over all control. Either way I want to get better at PHP if for no other reason than to have more control when working with wordpress, maybe even wright my own plugins to sell or giveaway.

Thanks
#autoresponder #create #reasonable #series
  • Profile picture of the author unnatural
    If you have the time and you're willing to learn - go for it. I've created my own that works with Mandrill, Mailgun, Sendgrid etc. and it has proven invaluable to my business. I wrote mine in Meteor JS (basically Node) in about 3 days and it does a lot more then just send emails, but I also have a ton of experience working with API's and automation.

    Even if you have moderate PHP skills you should be able to get something working pretty quickly. It might not be pretty or be battle tested but you have to start somewhere.

    Some things you will want to watch out for is duplicate sending of emails, email validation. I recommend keeping it on a local development server if you don't need access to it online (which takes care of all the security issues) or just lock down the sever it is running on to your IP(s).

    Also crons will suffice for low volume but if you want to scale you want to look into a queue (redis, Amazon SQS, etc. ) and either threaded workers or parallel workers feeding off the queue. Sending 100-200 emails/minute is still quite doable with a simple cron though so if you don't expect to need more then that don't worry about it.

    You won't get any better unless you practice and I think it is a good project to get your feet wet. If you have any questions feel free to reach out via PM and I'll help you out a long the way.
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    • Profile picture of the author Ghoro
      Thanks a lot for the reply and for your help on things to keep in mind and look out for, a lot of great tips I didn't know about or think of. And you're right that at the start it won't be pretty, but need to start somewhere and in the end hope to build up both my skills and the application to do more then just send emails as well.
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