1. A website host running Apache + PHP5 with htaccess support (most hosts have this) with FTP or SSH access to it.

2. Crontab for running scheduled background tasks on your site.

1. Unzip and FTP to the root folder of your website.

2. In FTP, edit the properties of the folder pubmail/admin/data and set them to 0777 (read + write + execute for all).

3. Now open the file settings.php for editing and change the settings found there.

4. Edit your crontab and add the following line to it, which will run the message sending script:

    */2 * * * * cd /PATH/TO/SITE/pubmail; /usr/bin/php -f queue.php
   

   Make sure you change "/PATH/TO/SITE" to be the actual folder path to your website, and /usr/bin/php may need to be changed to the location of PHP on your server as well.

   If you can use SSH to log into your website, you can find out what the path to your site is by typing "pwd" and hitting enter. You can find out the path to PHP by typing "which php" and hitting enter.

5. Open your browser and go to /pubmail/admin at your site. You should be able to log in using the admin username and password you set in step 3.

6. Import your existing email addresses into the subscribers list.

7. Open the folder pubmail/html and change any of the default info to suit your site.

8. To send a message, click "New Message" and enter a subject and body for the message, then click "Send". The message will be added to the queue and sent with a delay of 0.1 second between each email so as not to overwhelm your email server.

That's all there is to it, you now have a working email newsletter for yourself, your band, label or company!

The easiest way to integrate the PubMail application into your website is simply to link to /pubmail like this:

<a href="/pubmail/">Sign up to our mailing list</a>

This will create a link to a sign-up form that takes care of the rest.

If you want to integrate the sign-up form into your web pages though, then you can do this in one of three ways:

1. Include the sign-up form by adding this line of PHP code to any .php file:

    <?php include_once ('pubmail/subscribe.php'); ?>
   

2. Include the subscribe.php form as an iframe in a static .html file:

    <iframe src="/pubmail/subscribe.php" width="300" height="20"></iframe>
   

3. Build your own sign-up form that submits to the PubMail subscription handler:

    <form method="POST" action="/pubmail/">
    Subscribe to our mailing list:<br />
    <input type="text" name="email" />
    <input type="submit" value="Subscribe" />
    </form>
   

Feel free to customize the form all you like, but make sure to keep the form tag and the email field name as-is or it won't work.

The files in the html folder help you customize the look of the subscription page as well as the default messages. The files you'll want to customize are:

• default_message.php
• footer.php
• header.php
• style.css
• welcome_email.php

Sending email to people who have subscribed to your newsletter is not spam. However, it's easy to accidentally fall into spammy behaviour if you don't know a bit of etiquette.

People don't like to be auto-subscribed to something they didn't ask for. It's a great idea to provide incentives to sign up (a free MP3 in the welcome email for example, or members-only exclusives), but let subscribers opt-in versus having to manually opt-out and they'll like you more for it.

Similarly, when importing subscribers through the admin area, make sure you've already got their permission to do so, usually from collecting them at shows or events, or from a previous mailing list that this is replacing.

Another thing to note is that the reply-to address is going to receive unsubscribe and bounced message notices from time to time as email addresses change. When a notice comes in, make sure you log into the admin area and set that email address to bounced or unsubscribed so it stops receiving messages. People can unsubscribe themselves from a link in the messages, but you currently have to handle their account status manually by logging in and changing it. Hopefully the handling of these can be automated in the future, but for now it has to be done manually.

Brought to you by Johnny Broadway.