How to quickly build a call center mailer

  • Tutorial
We are organizing a conference for web developers and decided to call Chelyabinsk web studios. It was necessary to somehow send a beautiful letter right after the call. It is also important to receive reports on the delivery of letters and the “clickability” of links (the first for typos, and the second for evaluating business). Yes, and all this is needed “just yesterday”, and programmers are not available.

Challenge accepted! And the elegant solution is already under the cut ...

In general terms, the implementation looks like this:
  • in mandrill.com we configure SMTP, DKIM, SPF (the last two to increase the proportion of delivered letters), we will also see reports there;
  • we expand Drupal, configure sending html letters via smtp and the webform module (it can send letters to the address specified in the form);
  • close the form from the outside world;
  • create a letter and stuff it into our form;
  • show the operator how to log in and where to enter the address of the invitee.


1. Get SMTP with Buns


Mandrill is a mail delivery service from MailChimp. It is important for us that it provides the SMTP interface and the reports we need. Instead, you can take another similar one. So:
  • register, and immediately go to the Settings section , add the API Key, it will be a password, here are the SMTP details;
  • further in the Sending Domains subsection to confirm the domain, activate DKIM and add an SPF record (you will need access to the DNS domain from which letters will be sent, I recommend traffic rules from Yandex or cloudflare.com).

At the same step, you should decide on the address from which the letters will go. I also recommend setting up forwarding letters from there to yourself, as people will write in response to your newsletter.

It is worth noting that at the start you will be available 12,000 free letters and 250 items per hour. Further, the quota will increase if you do not spam. Or fall, as we have, if you forget to add the unsubscribe link.

2. Expand Drupal and configure sending letters


In order not to complicate the task, I suggest you download the pre-configured assembly . You just need to unzip the files in the host folder, fill in the dump in the database and change the details of connecting to the database in the /sites/default/settings.php file (from line 18). Administrator password in the archive.

And a few settings:
  1. Go to / admin / config / system / site-information (Configuration -> Site Information) and specify the email address from which you will send letters in the “Email Address” field.
  2. And now in / admin / config / system / phpmailer (Configuration -> PHPMailer) and fill in the fields with data from mandrillapp.com/settings/index (you can also enter your email address to check the settings):


  3. The form is available only to authorized users, and registration of new users is available only to the administrator, so you need to register accounts (or several) for call center operators. To do this, go to / admin / people / create (Users -> Add user) and fill out all the fields (we don’t put any role, but it’s convenient to notify you about creating an account):



    If you make several accounts, you can then look at productivity operators on the Results page (tab on the main page). By the way, yes, the form is displayed as the main page.
  4. Well, it remains to configure the letter itself. In the next step, we will deal with the letter code, but for now, let's do something test:
    • go to the page / node / 6 / webform / emails / 1 (on the form page: Questionnaire -> Configure alerts -> Edit opposite the only alert) and specify the name and address of the sender, the subject of the letter;
    • in the field “Email Template” you can specify something html-containing, later we will return here with our email code;
    • save everything and send a test invitation (with the main one), the letter should come.

    By the way, if you need to send not simple static letters, but something more complicated, then you can add fields to the form and insert their value in the letter through tokens.

3. We collect the letter


First of all, I want to remind you that letters must be made up in a special way. On a habr there are a lot of articles on this subject. Perhaps the comments suggest a tolerable constructor that allows you to get the letter code. I pulled the code from the newsletter that we did in the MailChimp analogue (via the link to the web version of the letter). Next time I will try to use github.com/mailgun/transactional-email-templates .

4. Profit!


It remains only to give the operator the address where you deployed the site, login, password and letters flew:



That's all I wanted to tell about sending letters by the call center. What do you think, colleagues?

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