I looking to see if I can do this in phplist. I would like to send out a email with a renewal form attached that is a PDF file.
The form is individualized for the member. So the form / PDF file has to match the member.
I’ve enabled the ALLOW_ATTACHMENTS and FILESYSTEM_ATTACHMENTS. I’m on ver. 3.2.4
I did some searching and saw a “hack” to do this but the post is old and I don’t know if it would still work.
Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks,
phpList is a ‘one to many’ system, where it sends one message to multiple recipients. There is no capability to ‘mailmerge’ into an attachment, however you can mailmerge into the body of the message using attributes.
It would take some very ‘fancy footwork’ to do that, where the attachment would need to be re-generated for each and every email.
I see… 
Well I have would have the attachments already generated for each member / email, and waiting in a directory
oh I forgot to add… here this the “hack” I saw
https://forums.phplist.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=38612
unfortunately I’m not much of a programmer, and not sure if this would work with the current version of phplist.
@M_a_v If you can generate the pdf files to include the subscribers email address in the file name then you could create a link to the personalised file
http://mysite.com/some_file_name_jsmith@xxx.com.pdf
but I don’t know how well including @ and . characters like that will work.
It is also not secure as, if I know someone else’s email address, I could access their file, but that might not be an issue for you.
A more secure way is to use the subscribers unique id, the 32 character value, which cannot easily be guessed. But then the system generating the pdf files would need to know those unique id values.
How are you intending to map subscribers to their individual file?
Does it have to be an attached pdf, or could it be a link to an online pdf?
Using a unique link would be a lot faster and easier.
If you really want to have fun with it, you could even incorporate customized links to Adobe Send & Track for all your renewal agreements.
@duncanc not sure if i can generate the pdfs with there email address.
they are normally generated with there member id for the file name. I have to check with the guy who created the script to generate the forms.
@NYChris Now using a link to an online PDF could work for us. as we do have the server space and the directory where the files are, can be removed when the renewal period is over.
ohh I don’t know if I really want to get into tracking etc… just yet. Sounds fun but at this point I just want to get them out!.. 375 forms to send and I don’t want to be stuffing envelopes or licking stamps like last year 
@M_a_v Regardless of how you do this, using the old code hack, individual pdf files for each subscriber, or generating the pdf on the fly, you need to be able to match each phplist subscriber to your membership system. Do you already have the membership id as an attribute of each subscriber?
Hi @M_a_v, I’m going to put in a plug for my mailing service:
I have all the machines to print, fold, mail insert, address, apply postage.
It turns out that physical mail is still alive and well… as well as (digital) email!
Dan
@duncanc Yup when I imported the list of members, there ID’s are in as an attribute.
I think the best way right now is having a link to an online PDF. should be easy enough to code into the email and wont over tax our web server.
Thanks for all the help guys…
@danwaterloo thanks… physical mailing wasn’t to bad but its the reliability lately of the US mail (at least in these parts).
last year, nearly 100 letters ether got to their recipients very late or not at all.
Interesting. My experience is that if about 50% of the emails get opened, then that is super successful. This opens up a big discussion not related to your post…
I agree. You can use an attribute placeholder to buildtheurl, which can be reused ever year.
so like www.mysite.com/pdfs/[PDFID] and every client has an attribute with their pdf id 
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