You can configure your mailing list to automatically subscribe senders of messages called “opt-in requests”. An opt-in request can be sent by anyone who wants to opt-in or subscribe; either directly from his or her email program or indirectly -- by submitting a sign-up form on your website (see Working with Web Forms and Text Extraction).
Opt-In Tab
To bring up the “Opt-In” tab, double-click the mailing list icon, and click the tab. Mark the check box labeled “Enable opt-in by email” to add support for opt-in requests.
Mark the “Enable double opt-in (send confirmation message)” check box if you want the mailing list to require confirmation from everyone who sends an opt-in request. It allows you to make sure that the sender really wants to be included on the mailing list. You can read about how you can use this function here: Double Opt-In.
Opt-In Conditions
Click the “Conditions” button to tell the mailing list how a message must look like to be recognized as an opt-in request. For instance, you may require that the subject of such message must say "subscribe" or that there has to be a specific email address in the To line (e.g. subscribe@updates.somedomain.com). To learn more read the section entitled Messages Matching User-Defined Conditions.
Opt-In Actions
Mark one or more check boxes grouped under the “Actions” label to define what happens after someone opts in.
You can tell the program to send back a reply by marking the “Reply with a message” check box, and clicking the “message” link to compose the reply. To find out about editing messages, read this chapter: Composing Mail Messages.
You can also set up FollowUpExpert to send notifications whenever someone opts in (“Send a new message to one or more email addresses”). Read this section to find out more: Sending a Message When New Mail Arrives.
If you want the new subscriber's email address to be automatically removed from other mailing lists, mark the option labeled “Opt-out from other mailing lists”, click the “mailing lists” link, select one or more lists, and click “OK”.
Finally, you can simply forward the opt-in request to a predefined list of email addresses (“Forward the original message to one or more email addresses”).
Parsing Opt-In Requests
By default, every new subscriber’s email address is taken from the From line of the incoming opt-in request message. You can click the "Mail Settings" tab and turn on the option labeled "Default sender email address is in Reply-To: header" to tell the program to take this address from the Reply-To line and only use the From line if Reply-To is not there (as is it sometimes the case).
You can customize the above behavior even more by telling the program to extract the email address from a predefined location in the body of an opt-in request. You are not limited to email addresses though; you can extract names of new subscribers, their phones, addresses, and so on.
For example, an opt-in request sent by a sign-up form on your website may look like this:
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Submission Results
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Email: someaddress@somedomain.com
Name: Joe Public
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You can easily configure FollowUpExpert to take the email address from the "Email" form field. To learn more, read this section: Extracting Text from Messages
You can use text extracted by the program in the initial replies to opt-in requests. See Text Extracted from Messages.
See also:
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