Building a Mailing List with Borland Delphi
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Mailing lists can be useful for a variety of purposes. If you have a newsletter that you use to communicate with your customers, chances are you use a mailing list. This article, the first of two parts, will show you how to build a mailing list application.
A downloadable file for this article is available
here.
Introduction
A mailing list is basically a compilation of names and address, in particular email addresses, that is either stored in a database or bought from some specialist company. It is usually organized around a interest shared by a group of people. For example, if you own a magazine, have subscribers, and want to let the subscribers know about the latest topics, then a mailing list is the way to do it. Spammers use mailing list to sent advertisements about products for their clients (it is highly recommended that you don't do this!).
A mailing list gives you the ability to sent one email to many people at the same time. In our mailing list application we will be able to divide a bunch of email addresses in groups and then sent email messages with attachments to each address in the group.
The Application
The mailing list application must do the following:
- Send one email message to many users simultaneously.
- Create groups of email addresses for those that share the same interest.
- Show status reports when sending email messages.
- Add and remove addresses
I will be using Borland Delphi's indy components to create the code that will send the email messages, as they are currently well-suited to the task. And I will use an MS Access database to store the email addresses. If you are going to have a couple hundred email addresses, then it is okay to use a small database like MS Access; if it is going to be any bigger, then you should consider using a database server like MS SQL or MySQL, as MS Access will not be able to cope.
MySQL is a free database server and is also very good. At some point I will be writing an article about how to use MySQL with Delphi, which will be helpful to this end. MS SQL is not free; in fact it's quite pricey. So I leave it up to you to decide which you'll use, when deciding how big your mailing list storage requirements are likely to be.
Next: The Database >>
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