Mailing Lists - Autofilling

[DK]

Here is the situation, our company is planning on sending out an email to 1000 people on own mailing list.

We have their name, emails and other contact in and we want to send them a email and have them click a link from that email. It will fire up a website page that is going to have them fill out a form, if we already have some of their info, is it possible to plug it in automatically to the form.

Just wondering how to go about this

 

[SharonTucci]

The best thing to do is put the data into a database. Create the form using php so that it will pull the info from the database based on email address. When mailing, include a personalized link for each recipient so that it will include the person's email address in the URL and have the PHP pull this.

 

[netzilla]

Sharon is exactly right. PHP/MySQL make a great tool for tasks like this. Instead of using the email address in the personal url you could also use the record id number. It all depends on how you setup the database. An example url would look something like this:

www.yoursite.com/formname.php?id=023 **using the record id

www.yoursite.com/[email protected] **using the email

 

[SharonTucci]

Using record id numbers on its own is NOT a good idea. The major issue here is privacy. When you use record numbers you might have some idiot getting the mailing that decides to check other record number-based urls. They could easily get whatever information you have in your database.

My own business background is in email marketing. I've had some clients that insisted on using such a similar system and in almost every case, 'security' was compromised as a result.

The best ways around this - if you do want to use record numbers - are to ban multiple access attempts from the same IP or to require them to enter their email address they received the email at before they can access the other info.

 

[netzilla]

Some type of authenication would be good no matter what kind or url used that way its as secure as possible.