Question Mass E-mailing Forum Members?

Hi, I live in the USA. I want to send my forum members a monthly update of feature changes and upcoming feature enhancements. My first question is, is this legal? Do they need to opt in first? I'm a little new to having a forum, but I like to send a monthly service update and updates with what's going on with the site?


Is a opt in and/or opt out required? Is there a service or Joomla extension you recommend to handle these type of user mass e-mails or should sending from my personal e-mail and hosting okay for sending mass user emails? I only have about 100 members so it's not a whole lot.

Hello sunny33days,

It is always good to have an opt in and opt out for when you send out mass emails like this. Some hosts only allow you a certain amount of emails per hour and some email clients can flag your emails as spam.

Now I don't know the actual rules about this but in the past I have used MailChimp to send out mass emails to my website's members. It is a great extension and you can find it here. This also has some modules that lets your members subscribe to email newsletters and unsubscribe as well. So check it out.

extensions.joomla.org/extensions/content...letter-bridges/13602

Hope this helps you out sunny33days.

Thanks, do you know how it's different from acymailing or aweber by chance? I guess I need something that doesn't have to use my hosting servers to send the e-mails. I'm not sure if Acymailing does that or not.

I honestly couldn't tell you sunny. I think MailChimp allows you a certain amount before it charges you, its free but I am not sure if they use their own server or not.

Take a look here: mailchimp.com/features/all/