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They say a picture paints a thousands words, so I’ll show you want I ultimately want to be able to do which is to have a page that does something like the following…
go to [url]www.emilyslist.com
They’re system is so sophisticated, once the referral email addresses are input, they have software in place to literally create new emails with the senders name in the FROM field, making it look like it really came from the sender, when it didn’t. This seems ethical since the site visitor literally approved the email being sent out to their friends, family, acquaintances, and the receiver knows who it’s coming from cause the approvers name has been placed in the FROM field by emilyslist software. It’s not really spam unless a phony person abuses the email input page, and most spammers have better things to do than to load up someone elses database with bogus emails that won’t help anyone in any way. It’s not email received from someone the recipient doesn’t know. Well it is, it came from emilyslist, with the from field manipulated, but not without the orginal sender’s approval. It’s a convenience… emilyslist is simply making it efficient to get the emails out. Obviously, when someone agrees to join their group, records are created in some sort of database behind the scenes so that whatever email campaigns they gen up in the future, their software can do it easily, but I’m nowhere near there yet. I’m just a know-nothing schmuck using the same email contact lists the rest of the world has to send out my rinky-dink newsletter.
I’m totally green, so don’t know anything about all the different sub-topics on this site like XML, CSS, etc. I’m about to try and gain experience with Joomla, mySQL, templates, and haven’t got a PAID web host yet. I have no idea whether the program running behind the scenes to create emails is something easily coded, has to be purchased from a vendor, is simple shareware, or if it’s only going to be available from a full-fledged web development company at a hefty price. If anyone knows, please let me know.
IN THE MEAN TIME, I have a simple static html web page, hosted for free, similar to homestead or geocities where at most you can embed a chunk of html, like a paypal or youtube section, even though I can’t tell you anything about that code. I don’t really know html. I’d like to have something as similar to the emilyslist page as possible. At the very least, I’m prepared to forego the automatic generated emails cause I know I can’t do that now without lots of help or paying someone big bucks. (what subject area do I need to buy a book on and go learn to be conversant on this? What are the buzzwords for this feature/technology?)
Unless you have a better idea for someone who can’t code web development himself, I’d love to put in some input boxes on a static html page that lets people type in the name and/or email address for their friends, then when they click ‘submit’ it comes to my own email inbox like a basic contact form which I CAN do right now, and I manually add the email addresses to a simple email contact list, and they are now part of my network to receive future emails. It’s the long way I know, and very time consuming, but all I know how to do. I’d have to send out emails to the new people one at a time, and put the friend referrer’s name in the body of the email so they’d know who it came from…slow and time consuming, but better than nothing.
Why not just have them type email addresses in a big text box if I already have a contact form on my site? I suppose I could, but I figure if they at least see a separate box for each email, it looks a little more sophisticated.
The contact form I’m using now was coded by the free web host and cannot be altered. The free web host won’t allow it. It’s part of their scheme. I just click on ‘creat contact form’ at the top and it embeds the form, pre-made, into the web page. The collection of the data and forwarding to my email address is done by them behind the scenes, how I don’t know, but I just know I can’t alter the form. I don’t even think I can get to the html and change it even if I knew what I was doing.
So I have two time frames in mind. What can I do now if anything to have a better method at minimal cost, and what do I need to get something sophisticated sometime in the future, besides paying someone tens of thousands of dollars?
Suggestions? Thoughts? Answers? Thanks.