Yahoo Mail Question
September 26th, 2006I switched from Yahoo Mail to Gmail a long time ago, but I still get dozens of emails a day sent to my old Yahoo email address. I forward them to Gmail, but I'd like to make sure my 2,600 contacts in my Yahoo Address Book and many thousands of other people who have emailed me in the past know my new email address.
I've avoided using Plaxo just because it annoys me so much when other people use it. I love LinkedIn.com because the email addresses of my 480+ contacts there get updated automatically whenever they update their profile. Maybe I should use Plaxo, but I'm looking for another solution.
Does anyone know how I can email not only the contacts in my Yahoo Address Book but also the thousands of others with whom I have corresponded in Yahoo Mail, whom I haven't added to my Address Book?
I've been looking for some kind of email harvest tool, but every one I found works primarily on external web sites and won't allow me to legitimately harvest my own email contacts in my own personal address book?
That is my first question.
My second question is how do I harvest all the email addresses from people who have posted comments on my personal blog? I'd like to invite them to listen in on a free conference call and possibly join an online network of entrepreneurs in an exclusive private forum. I certainly don't want to collect their email addresses on at a time. I use WordPress 2.03, and I read something about a MySQL query that could give me access to the email addresses of the commenters, but I don't know more than that.
That is my second question.
Finally, how should I get around the Yahoo Mail limit of 100 emails sent at a time? To notify all my legitimate contacts that my email address has changed, I'll need to send about 5-6,000 emails out, and I don't want to do them in batches of 100.
That is my third question.
Any suggestions from all of the wonderful people out there?
Posted in: Blogging Email Marketing Software for Entrepreneurs
September 27th, 2006 at 00:34 AM
Paul:
Nice conference call today, thanks for sharing so freely your ideas and experiences.
For WordPress, you can just do an SQL query from your favorite database interface application:
select distinct(comment_author_email) from wp_comments
The "wp_" may differ depending on your setup, but that is the default I think.
September 27th, 2006 at 00:59 AM
Import the addresses into a Yahoo Group and email them that way? You might also set up a free personal salesforce.com account and import the addresses, then use the "keep in touch" feature, assuming it is available in the free version.
Log into php-my-admin, it (or something similar)should come with your hosting account. It's a GUI interface to your mysql database. If you are careful you should be able to click through to find the email address table, and then export it as a csv file.
Yahoo Groups solves question 3 too.
5000 email addresses? Wow...
September 27th, 2006 at 04:46 AM
Here's the sql query:
SELECT DISTINCT comment_author, comment_author_email
FROM wp_comments
WHERE comment_author_email != ''
AND comment_approved = '1';
September 27th, 2006 at 13:25 PM
This sql will give you the email addresses...
SELECT DISTINCT `comment_author_email` , `comment_author`
FROM `wp_comments`
WHERE comment_author_email != ''
If you're using phpMyAdmin, you can export those results as a CSV or EXCEL file.
September 27th, 2006 at 17:04 PM
I echo Michael's comment about yesterday's conference call. Plus, I'd like to get my email address in your wordpress database before you harvest the emails :)
December 2nd, 2006 at 05:51 AM
You don't need to send email through Yahoo Mail for it to come from your Yahoo email account. You can use a PHP mail script, for example, to send 6000 emails that have your Yahoo email address as the From address (and Reply To address). To the recipients, the email will look just like it came from your Yahoo account, but you won't have the 100-email limit.
The only downside is the 6000 emails won't be saved to your Yahoo Mail Sent Items folder.. but then again, that might be a plus.
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