Website form info to Email Blast

I have a customer whose business deals with kids parties. They want to have an interface where users can essentially send an online invite to their list of guests. Here are some things I’ve considered:

  1. I’ve looked at evite and some similar sites, thinking i could create a template that we could direct users to fill in a few fields and add their list – these systems don’t seem very flexible, basically upload 1 image and enter limited info.

  2. We have a system that would allow users to essentially design their own invite and output a PDF. this wouldn’t be easy for a client to convert into an email format however.

  3. Using constant contact or mail chimp don’t seem to have anything that I could automate.

  4. Using a web form and building a simple email with the information, and allowing multiple recipients may get the server flagged for spamming.

Any thoughts on these ideas and expanding on them to accomplish my goal? If not, does anyone know of services or wordpress plugins that may help?

Thanks

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It’s easy enough to offer a field to add a list of email address to send to, plus a few other fields for content, BUT your biggest issue is security. Leaving a form open to input that can add multiple email address is a disaster waiting to happen, before you know it your form will be compromised and possibly your hosting account banned and blacklisted.

You may be able to get around it by requiring a login and limiting the number of times a form can be submitted per hour/day/month, this would at least deter fly by spammers. Even if you did have the form behind a login if you site was compromised a hacker/spammer could easily access the form and abuse it.

Another workaround would be for the email information to be stored before sending, the site admin gets a notification to review it and then can send it if it’s appropriate.

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thanks for the reply. How would you have info stored before sending? Trying to wrap my brain around how I would accomplish that.

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Typically you’d store the data in a database so it can be retrieved and manipulated from there.

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Gotcha, so no secure way to automate this email process?

What about using something like Zapier to automate the process? You could connect a form to Mailchimp (or other). They have something called multi-step Zaps now, so you could 1) create a new list from the email list input by the client, 2) send the message in the form to that new mailing list.

That still leaves you vulnerable to spam attacks, so maybe you build a timer into it and require manual approval? Or limit it to users who are logged in?

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