Hi Does anyone know how I can make a mailing list thing where I have a little form and say that I will offer them free information on music information,

and they enter their name and email address. What ends up happening? Does the email get stored in my hosting account? Or can someone tell me how it work and teach me how to do it?

Thanks.

Sure. You can use a simple little form, and when a user enters in their info, it gets sent to a text file with proper formatting and everything.

Pros:

• Short
• Simple
• Easy to modify

Cons:

• Incredibly insecure (that can be changed, though)

Create a .txt file and name it "emails.txt".
And then paste this code into a file: (has to be a .php file for it to work)

PHP Code:

<?php 
$database = "emails.txt"; 
$file = fopen($database, "a+");
$size = filesize($database);
$name = $_POST['name'];
$email = $_POST['email'];
if($_POST['submit']) fwrite($file, "\"$name\" <$email>,");
?>

<form method="post">
Name: <input type="text" name="name" size="20"><br />
Email: <input type="text" name="email" size="20"><br /><br />
<input type="submit" value="Subscribe" name="submit">
</form>

As I said, it is incredibly insecure. If you wanted to get a secure one, you would want to use a MySQL database.

Tell me if it works out for you!
- Steve

Hi Steve,

When you say incredibly insecure, what does this mean? People can hack into my websites?

Well, they can just look at the text file and see the email addresses. But you could give your file a real complicated name, or even simpler, put your text file in a different directory and put a .htacess file in it.

- Steve

How do I send emails out to everyone?

Just copy all the addresses in the .txt file and paste them into your BCC.
Simple, really.

- Steve

That won't work. Well it may work for a few addresses, but mail servers will limit you to either;
A limit to the number BCC recipients or a maximum of messages sent per hour.

it didnt work...

Are you sure you are doing it right? Remember that you have to paste the php and html code into a seperate file, not the emails.txt file.

- Steve

It seems to be working on the website, okay, however when I go look at the txt file which it should be storing the information to, theres nothing there. I copied the php script to a .php file made a .txt for it to save the information to and then copied the html into my html code...

does the html code need to be referenced to the php file at all the link the two together?I know the php is linked to the txt file... I mean, how does the form know to use that specific php script. what if I had like three different php files in the same directory..

Oh. I'm sorry if the tutorial was a little unclear. The php code and the html code both go in the same page.

- Steve

so the php script has to be put in a .php file and pasted into the html for the website?

No, the php goes into whatever page you have your form on.
But that page will need to have a .php extension.

- Steve

sweet it worked. So Since I have the php pasted into the actual index.html along with the html is the .php file with the php script necessary?

No, that individual file is not necessary.

- Steve

Thank You Very Much Steve. One more quick question. There is a part of the php script that is called like success or something that prints "thank You for submitting email..." after the user has in fact submitted their email. Is there a way to style that, currently it is the same color as the background and aligned to the left of my apge. Lol I tried putting a < div> tag around the success text to style it with css and it FREAKED out.

Where is the code? That code is not in the script that I gave you. Could you please post it?

- Steve

<?php
$filename = 'yourfile.txt'; //where to store data

if(isset($_POST['mail'])) {
$newcontent = htmlspecialchars(trim($_POST['mail']));
if(!empty($newcontent)) {
if (is_writable($filename)) {

if (!$handle = fopen($filename, 'a')) {
echo "Cannot open file ($filename)";
exit;
}
if (fwrite($handle, $newcontent."\n") === FALSE) {
echo "Cannot write to file ($filename)";
exit;
}
echo "Thanks! You will be informed."; //success
fclose($handle);
} else {
echo 'Sorry, the file "' . $filename . '" is not writable';
}
}
}
?>

Oh... erm... that's actually Mad182's script from the last thread that you started. I guess can help you with it. I'm sure glad that you posted it because I thought you were tinkering around with my script. I guess I've been helping you in the dark.

Use something like '<span style="your styling here">Thanks! You will be informed.</span>'. My help is limited, because I am unfamiliar with this script and how it works.

- Steve