Prerequisites
If you haven’t installed Mailster yet, take a look at the installation tutorial for the system requirements and the quickest way to install Mailster.
Set up a mailing list
Open Mailster and get started
- Open Mailster (Start Center)
- Choose ‘Add mailing list‘ from the tasks list
General settings
In this section you will provide some basic data of your new mailing list.
- Mailing list name: Choose a name for your mailing list
- Mailing list email: Enter the email the mailing list members will send their mails to
- Mailing admin email: The administrator will get notifies when something goes wrong, must not be the list’s email and must be a valid email address
- Active: Make sure the list is active (this enables mail retrieving and forwarding)
After that click on the next tab (Mailbox settings).
Mailbox settings
Mailster uses a normal email mailbox that can be accessed with IMAP or POP3.
The settings in this section are crucial for a working mailing list. Ask your mail provider (of the mailing list email you provided in the last section) for the needed details or have a look at the settings of popular providers.
Choose “New server” to enter your credentials.
- Host/Server: The address of the mail server
- User/Login: The user to login with. In general, the email address or the part of the email address before the @ letter.
- Password: The user’s password
- Port: The port number of the mail server
- Protocol: The protocol to use at this server/port
- Secure setting: You can enable a secure connection when the server supports this feature
- Use secure authentication: Some servers require secure authentication
- Special parameters: Not always needed, read the corresponding hint in Mailster to learn more
Click on ‘Check inbox connection settings‘ to make sure your settings are correct.
Attention! Please use a dedicated mailbox for Mailster. Any emails in it will be treated as mailing list emails and therefore send out to the recipients. Thus, do not use your personal email accounts, create/use a different email account.
After that, click on the next tab (Sender settings).
Sender settings
You have two choices here: the easy way is to use your normal mailbox sender (the one Joomla uses and which is configured in the ‘Global Configuration’).
The other way (which is recommended) is similar to what you did before for the inbox settings.
- Use Joomla mailer: The following settings are only interesting if you don’t want to use the Joomla mailer.
- Host/Server: The address of the mail server
- User/Login: The user to login with. In general, the email address or the part of the email address before the @ letter.
- Password: The user’s password
- Port: The port number of the mail server
- Secure setting: You can enable a secure connection when the server supports this feature
- Use secure authentication: Some servers require secure authentication
Click on ‘Check sender connection settings‘ to make sure your settings are correct.
Further settings
At this point, you have the basic setup for a working mailing list. Of course, there are further tabs with settings helping you to customize and fine-tune your mailing list. Those settings are covered separately and can be found (under the respective settings title) in the documentation.
Save the mailing list
After that, click on Save in the toolbar.
You will get the message that your new mailing list was saved and will be back on the list where you can manage all your mailing lists.
Now we are ready to add recipients to our mailing list.
Adding recipients
It is nice to have a mailing list. It is even nicer to actually have some people who want to receive the list’s emails.
Now let’s add some of those folks to our recipients…
- Click on ‘Manage recipients’
The tab ‘All recipients’ gives an overview of all recipient names and email addresses – well, not too much until now.
- Click on the plus beside ‘List members’
- Choose all users you want to add on the left side
- Click on the single arrow pointing to the right (second button)
- Click on ‘Add users to recipients’ to add the selected users to the mailing list
You can add every Joomla user as a recipient.
Don’t worry if not all recipients belong to your Joomla users – you can store them under the user section and add them later.
Now save the new list members.
A feature that you might find useful if you want to manage several mailing lists are user groups that you can add to the recipients.
Example: you have a group ‘Designers’ that is enrolled in the mailing lists ‘Support’ and ‘Development’.
Whenever the designer department has a new co-worker or intern their email addresses have only to be added in the group ‘Designers’ not in every mailing list.
Send an email / Send a message to the list
All set! Now go ahead and send a greeting email to your mailing list – all recipients should receive it 🙂
In our case, we would send an email to innovation@example.com.
You can send it any way you like – use your favorite email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, GMail, …).
What next?
Now it is time to test the list and, if needed, to adapt the other mailing list settings.