Mass mailing targeting a CB user list

I have been googling for this quite a lot, but all I find is people asking the same question and references to the apparently dead CbMailing. The user list is a very powerful concept in CB, but I find it suprising that there's no functions for using these lists for communications. What I'm looking for is something with these features:

- Admin can select which CB user lists are OK for mass communication
- Admin can select what user level is required for doing mass communication
- Users of sufficient level can access a frontend component that:
- Let them select one of the allowed lists and preview the list of names.
- Let them compose a message.
- Let them select to send using e-mail or PMS.

Some points:
- The mass mailing components are typically built aroud the philosohpy that people subscribe to lists. They may have CB integration, but that is typically just subscription through the CB user interface.
- If the mass mailers can handle CB user lists, it is typically importing the lists and creating their own lists. Not a "real-time" linkage of them.
- Mass mailing without user subscription is naturally bad in some situations, but there's also a lot of cummunities where members can expect communication from the community without an explicit subscription.

If not core functionality in CB, this could well be an extension.

Mike

I manage the website for a small (175 members) group. One of the things they really want to be able to do is for any member to be able to submit a question to all members (mass email).

It would be great if this could be done from the frontend. I did find a couple of modules that would do a mass email from the frontend - but they didn't work well, and were not user friendly.

Right now the solution I use is that the member fills out a form (proforms) which gets sent to me. I go in the back end change the admin email to that user's email (so all replies will be routed to them) and mass mail the question. (Rembering to change the admin email back to mine afterward.)

Kind of a bandaid solution, but the best I could come up with. It would be great if frontend mass emailing could be a part of Community Builder in a future release.

An additional uasability improvement:

With this functionality available, it should be possible to provide buttons in the list views. There could be seprate buttons for sending a message to the listed users using PM and mail. These buttons should naturally only be shown if the user has rights to communicate to that particular list.

I have checked this with some of my users. They would love it and use it frequently.

Mike

It would be great if this could be done from the frontend. I did find a couple of modules that would do a mass email from the frontend - but they didn't work well, and were not user friendly.

Any news on this one yet? I have the same issue where i have a all registered users want to be able to mass mail.

sigi76 wrote:

It would be great if this could be done from the frontend. I did find a couple of modules that would do a mass email from the frontend - but they didn't work well, and were not user friendly.

Any news on this one yet? I have the same issue where i have a all registered users want to be able to mass mail.

Just in case you missed it ... CB User Manager has mass emailing from backend.

I'm aware of the the backend but it is a bad alternative for us. Yes, we can use it for some of the mailings but our site is set up so that only technical admins have backend access and all content providers work solely in the frontend.

I still think there's a need for an extension that does this from the frontend.

Mike