Looking for ideas, tactics, strategies… The goal is to get the cleanest-possible restart without losing current subscribers.
There is something wrong with my phpList installations (I have two, to keep completely separate my pen names), but I don’t know what or why. I mentioned in a different thread the first major symptom I noticed (trying to send email to blacklisted recipients). Another is that a bounce rule for a spam complaint correctly blacklisted that person but also blacklisted a second person who hadn’t been active on the list for over a year.
I suspect this is a data problem, not a code problem, and it may have been triggered by something I did months ago (which I didn’t document for my future self, unfortunately).
Attempting to switch to a different software package was a waste of time and money. I now want to start over cleanly in phpList, but I don’t want to rebuild my lists from scratch, so it’s not truly a fresh start.
I just don’t know how to do this in a way that minimizes impacts on my subscribers and retains existing mail-suppression data. Ideally it would not break existing unsubscribe links, because people sometimes click those links in older campaigns, but I realize this is probably asking too much.
I’ll outline below my current plan, but I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has experience trying to “reset” phpList without completely starting over - especially if there’s a more effective way than what I have in mind now.
Currently my idea is to do the following for each existing phpList installation:
- Install the latest phpList to a new subdomain
- Configure the lists I want to use going forward
- Configure the user attributes I want to use going forward
- Use the old installation to export a list of everybody who is not currently receiving mail from me
- Use the old installation to export a list of active subscribers
- Import into the new installation the inactive subscribers and ensure they are blacklisted, unconfirmed, and not subscribed to any list
- Import the active subscribers to the relevant list(s) in the new installation
Clearly I will lose a lot of information by doing this, including bounce counts, original subscription details, each subscriber’s campaign history, etc. It will be a lot like switching to different software or a hosted service.
An alternative is to just give up on my current lists and truly start over from scratch, maybe with a final email to the old subscribers to give them a link to resubscribe if they really want my newsletter. I’ll probably lose 80-90% of them, but at least those who sign up again will be more engaged and less likely to mark my newsletter as spam because, for them, the double-opt-in would be more like quadruple-opt-in.