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Managing Email Lists

Email List Types

There are two types of Email Lists - Online and Offline.

Online lists

Online lists are not stored on your local computer, rather they reside on internet server. Online lists are useful when you keep a database of, e.g., your visitors/customers email list, where people can subscribe, unsubscribe or manage their preferences (e.g. define which mailings they'd like to receive). In the program, only references (URLs) to these lists are stored. When you wish to send mass emails and select an online list to send messages to, the program loads the entire list every time before sending a message. This ensures that you send messages to the latest instance of your lists (e.g. some people may have (un)subscribed since your last sending). These lists can be both static and dynamic. Static lists are regular text files with one email per line. For example, you can have a file customer_emails.txt stored on your server. The file format should be as following:
email1@server.com
email2@server.com
...
URL of this list may be http://www.YourServer.com/customer_emails.txt.

Dynamic lists are generated with some server script (e.g. Perl or PHP) from a database. In this case, the output of these scripts must be again a text file (with content type header of TEXT/TXT), with one email per line. Sample Perl script that generates such output is below:

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Content-type: text/txt\n\n";
print <<EOF;
email1@server.com
email2@server.com
EOF
exit;

URL of this list may be
http://www.YourServer.com.cgi?-bin/generate_list.cgi?
You can also pass some parameters to your script (e.g. to only get customers that subscribe to "Website news"). In this case the URL may be like
http://www.YourServer.com.cgi?-bin/generate_list.cgi?list_type=website_news

Adding online list to the Seeker

If you would like to add an online Email List, just press "New List" button in "Manage Email Lists" section. Then, select list type "online". You will be asked to give a name of the list (you'll see this name in the program and enter list's URL. You can give a name "My Customers", for example. In URL field, just give list's URL. From the example above, the URL may be http://www.YourServer.com/customer_emails.txt (static), http://www.YourServer.com.cgi?-bin/generate_list.cgi? or http://www.YourServer.com.cgi?-bin/generate_list.cgi?list_type=website_news  (dynamic).

Offline lists

Offline lists are stored on your local computer. Once you create an offline list, you have to give it a name (e.g. "My Customers"). After that, you have three options to add emails to the list. You can add results of your seek job(s), import offline text file or import online list. If you are importing a text file, it must be formatted one email per line. If you are importing an online list, it should return TEXT/TXT content with one email per line (exactly like in section "online lists") above.

[!] Once you have imported an online list to offline list, the program stores it on your local computer. Once you send emails to the list, the program will not check latest version of online list and send emails to recipients that exist in the offline list.

Tip: Main program window provides easy "drag and drop" option. You can just drag seek job(s) to any offline list and all emails will automatically be added to your destination list. Any duplicate emails will be removed.

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