My friend has asked me to help him with his proposed email newsletter that people will sign up for on his financially-themed website. He wants to give recipients the option to stop receiving the newsletter with an "unsubscribe" link in the newsletter email.

What is the cleanest, easiest arrangement to let my friend receive the email addresses to be removed from his database?

I take it if system is php or asp based. Your link will have his email id and user id . Just make a simple page where you can get this from url (userid and email address). And that code will update the status as not to send any more emails to this user or just deleet his record from your DB.

Please remove me from your E-mail list
Thank you
james@alancornelius.net

You can pay someone to do all this for you. There are plenty of companies out there that will manage your mailing list (including subscriptions and unsubscriptions). Might be easier than trying to do all that yourself, especially if you don't know what is required.

I've heard good things about Lyris. Never used it myself.

Agreed.

Aweber also gets excellent reports, and although it's a little more expensive I understand it's well worth the premium.

Hi...

I had the same problem as you have (or had )...but now that I do this for a living, I think I can help explicitly

Like it or not, you need to have a database, just to make it easier.
Try looking for programs like DesktopEmailer or SendBlaster.

This is because they have a database integrated and you don't need to write a php newsletter system.

The magic is in the "tags". These are used for personalization. Like when you have 10,000 customers and you want each of them to receive his mail with "Dear Mr (his name) (his lastname)".
You will never manually send 10,000 such mails.

Having that explained, you have to know that these tags can contain any text.

So just create an unsub link like this :

<a href="mailto:#thisisthetag#?Subject=Unsubscribe&Body=I want to unsubscribe">Unsubscribe</a>

and #thisisthetag# = your friends email (retrieved by the program - no effort from your side)

If you know a little PHP, you could parse the argument at the end of the link like this :

LINK :

<a href="http://www.sitename.com/script.php?mail=#tag#>Unsubscribe</a>

#tag# - customer's email (again, retrieved by the program)

PHP :

<?php
$mail=$_GET['mail'];
$subject = "Unsubscribe";
$text = "The customer with the e-mail address".$mail." wants to UNSUBSCRIBE from the newsletter";
mail('user@server.com',$subject,$text,"From: $mail <$mail>");
header("location:thankyoupage.html");
?>

Just save what's above in a script.php file.

thankyoupage.html = a page kept in the same directory with the PHP script

Cheers man!

Any questions, i'm <email snipped>

How about PHPlist?