Automated emailing of PDFs - advice needed!

[fluvius]

Hi all,

 

I hope I'm posting this to the right forum, but I need a bit of advice/ideas/suggestions on how to perform the following using PHP.

 

I want to make some free PDF brochures available on a website, but I want to take the email address of the person requesting the brochures in case I may want to follow it up at some future point to check on whether they liked the brocures and whether there is any potential business from them.

 

Basically I'd like the process to work like this:

• Visitor goes to brochure page and ticks all those brochures that they're interested in, then hits the Submit button
  
• The site records their details (name, telephone no., email address) in a MySQL database
  
• The site sends them an email, either with the selected brochures attached to it, or it gives the visitor one or more links to click on to download the brochures from the site
  

 

Regarding the last bullet point, I'm not sure which would be the best solution. If they request many brochures the size of the email plus attachments may exceed their maximum email size limit, but I'm not sure how it would work providing them with one or more links.

Also I want to avoid the possibility that the visitor forwards their email to another person so that they can download the brochures, therefore bypassing the site and without my capturing their email address.

 

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions on what is possible.

 

I am a total PHP novice, so if there's already some code out there that could perform this, that would be great.

 

Thanks in advance for all help.

Tony.

[battlesiege]

I personally think sending out links is better, is better, just try to keep the URL's shorts.

 

Why would you want to stop people forwarding there emails to their friends, you may not get there personal details, but if they are interested in your business then they will contact you anyway and you will get them then.

[schilly]

well either way, (attachment or links) they could forward the email to someone and they could access the pdfs.

 

i would stay away from attachments. the emails could get too big and there is also the possibility of stressing the mail server (depending on traffic).

 

if you are really concerned about capturing the email address, you may need an account system and they would need to login to download the pdfs.

 

The other option is to set some kind of timestamp hash and add that to the download link. use a php download script which then checks the timestamp hash and if it's within a certain time period, have it send the file for downloading else say the link has expired.

[battlesiege]

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