Starting over without starting over

ℹ️ Support
1

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:

  1. Install the latest phpList to a new subdomain
  2. Configure the lists I want to use going forward
  3. Configure the user attributes I want to use going forward
  4. Use the old installation to export a list of everybody who is not currently receiving mail from me
  5. Use the old installation to export a list of active subscribers
  6. Import into the new installation the inactive subscribers and ensure they are blacklisted, unconfirmed, and not subscribed to any list
  7. 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.

2

Here are some suggestions of an approach:

  1. First, make a backup of your current databases.
  2. On a separate system, restore the backup so you can ‘play around’ with the tables, and perhaps see what’s going on.
  3. the user_user table should show you who is confirmed, blacklisted, opted in, bouncecount
  4. another table ‘user_blacklisted’ lists everyone that is permanently blacklisted
    Most likely, these two tables have what you need for your ‘start over’ system.

Your goal is to keep the users, and retain the confirmed/blacklisted data… if you keep copies of the original databases, then you can always lookup the other data, such as when and how they subscribed, unsubscribed, etc, if you ever need to look that up.

3

Thanks, that’s a good idea. Between work and being sick I haven’t had time and energy to do anything meaningful with my newsletters, but time is ticking down to the next date for sending. Hopefully this weekend I can make progress, and your suggestion is a good starting point.