[HELP WANTED] Mail Chimp / Mailing List Expert

[MicroGuy]

Are any of you guys interested in helping us setup a Mail Chimp account?

We could pay someone that has experience organizing and sending periodic mailings.

[ElscottHavoc]

I have a Mail Chimp account but I haven't used it for a couple f years.  I used to have a website that was pretty subscription heavy and there was a script that used the Mail Chimp API to integrate automatic newsletter creation and add people to organized subscriptions.

Setting up the API was beyond my scope but as far as directly using Mail Chimp, I'd probably have to brush up on my skills a bit, but I'm pretty confident I'd pick it up quick again.

What exactly is the project consisting of? Custom created Newsletters...

Currently the free version has a limited number of newsletters per day or month of something, and Ink ow I used to have to keep on eye on my corn jobs as my site grew to keep it under that limit...so my only concern would be ensuring I'm not the hook for an account exceeding that number and fronting fees.

[MicroGuy]

Basically, I was thinking along the lines of a periodic newsletter. I could export the email addresses from the forum database. The forum has a built in newsletter but its very restrictive in its function.

I've got a Mail Chimp account but have never used it. Maybe there's an option where I could add you as an authorized user. Tomorrow I'll take a look and also begin a thread detailing the community's projects and development budget.

I'm hoping that by creating a newsletter we can better keep the community informed about current events, and also begin working together in a more organized fashion.

[ElscottHavoc]

Sounds good.  I've got an unusually busy weekend so I'll probably not have time this weekend to research but let me know what you find out as I'll try to pop in for updates.

I don't know of any direct mail chimp integration with SMF, but perhaps another option would be to integrate this SMF forum with a Wordpress bridge and then use the Wordpress integration that exists for Mail Chimp to automate everything...although adding a Wordpress script in the middle is probably overly complicated.  Given the existence of the Mail Chimp API someone with technical abilities exceeding mine could probably directly integrate it, but an smf bridge to WordPress bridge to mail chimp bridge could be a work around.

[MicroGuy]

Thank you for your reply. 

I just found a solution that might work better than Mail Chimp. The main problem I was having in the past was the SMTP relay limits of my email provider. I've just signed up for Amazon SES and opened a support ticket to increase by daily sending limit.

I'll experiment with using the built-in forum newsletter in conjunction with Amazon SES and report back with my findings ASAP.