Month: February 2017

Grammar Captive has successfully sent its first mass mailing using the PHPMailer library. Hooray! Hooray!

Yes, it was only sent to two people, but the mechanism is now in place for sending to many many more.

Next Up: Combine Grammar Captive’s newly acquired ability to: one, send an HTML insert; two, extract email addresses from Grammar Captive’s database; and three, send a single email message to multiple newsletter subscribers with a single click.

Sending a newsletter must be as easy as receiving it!

Roddy

Grammar Captive is now able to upload files via a dynamically built form. This is a useful first step in mass mailing that will also prove useful when it comes time to build a membership forum.
Roddy

Although still in its test phase Grammar Captive has just sent its first successful multipart (MIME) email message using PHPMailer — the software selected by Grammar Captive for the purpose of mass mailing.

Two messages (one containing ASCII script — namely, English — and one containing Japanese) in both the address line and body were sent. Both messages contained images.  Both were successfully transmitted over a secure TLS/SSL connection.

Though a small issue, it was discovered during the experimentation that copies cannot be sent to recipients when the name is included in the address line. In short,

CC: iwato@hashimori.com OK
CC: Hashimori Iwato <iwato@hashimori.com> NOT OK

Still users must be warned.

Arabic was not attempted, but will surely work.  This is because both use the same character set — namely, UTF-8.

Roddy

Grammar Captive is now able to store individual user data received in any language from an online form, store it in a database, and retrieve all of it in a fell swoop.

Next Up: Use this information to mail en masse to all registered users.

Roddy

Have created a MySQL database on a local test server and learned how to fill it automatically from data received from an online form.

Next Up: Retrieve the data and use it to send a newsletter to a large number of recipients.

Roddy

Next up is the creation of the code that will automatically collect new user information in a secure database and generate from this a mailing list for the Grammar Captive newsletter.

Roddy

Grammar Captive is now able not only to create a multipart MIME message, but also to send it over a secure connection using the PHP/PEAR Mail_smtp object.

Roddy

Multipart Messages are messages that contain tesx, HTML, embedded images, and attachments. They are the handsome messages that attract your eye and encourage you to read more.

Using the PHP’s Mail_mime class Grammar Captive is now able to produce multipart messages.

Roddy

Grammar Captive’s first newsletter and a PHP connection that will link user info directly to a secure MySQL database.

Roddy

The problem of security has been resolved more quickly than I thought.

LunarPages, the web host for the Grammar Captive website offers its users something called Shared SSL.

Already I have incorporated Shared SSL into those webpages that request personal information from users.

You can read about how Shared SSL works under the new subheading called Internet Security on the Grammar Captive homepage.

Roddy