Mass Mailer/Newsletter

After lots of misunderstanding on my part I finally had it driven into me head that the mass mailer is tied to site notifications.  What?  A newsletter is NOT a notification; a notification is "You have mail".  I am constantly shaking my head over the line of thought that Boonex has made on so many areas in Dolphin.  There should be a separate switch for the newsletter from site notifications.  Has anyone separated the two as that is what I want to do?  Perhaps the newsletter can be added to the subscriptions thingy?  Or even just a separate, Receive Newsletter: Yes/No. 

Boonex, why did you think that a newsletter should be tied to notifications; which developer decided this was proper?  A user may be fine with getting the newsletter but may not want to get emails about "You Have Mail!".  However, it is all or none with Boonex Dolphin concerning this.

Shouldn't be too hard to add a field to the database and some code to add a block to the profile page or account page so they can turn on and off getting the newsletter.  Was just hoping someone could save me some time if they had already done this.

You know that I have to agree!!! Anyone know how to fix this?

The mass mailer checks the member's notification field in the database to see if they should get the newsletter.  If the user has turn off receiving notifications, they are not added to the list; if the switch is on, then they get the newsletter.

The solution is to change the mass mailer from checking the notification field to checking the new newsletter field.  The user will be notified to change the setting if they decide they do not wish to receive the newsletter as by US law CAN SPAM ACT.

Yes, this is a big problem. I want my members to receive notifications, but they may not want to receive my newsletter.

Consequently, I try to send very little correspondence, and tell folks if they want to be a member then they have to agree to accept limited notifications. If they don't want to receive the emails then they have to delete their membership. So far nobody has taken issue with me on this. We do have people who occasionally want to be removed period and probably the newsletter reminds them of this... :)

Peer

I added a field to the profile edit, Receive Newsletter, placing it under the Email Notify one.  While I would have liked an independent block and not make it a part of the profile edit form, that was the quickest for now.  Now all I have to do is to edit the mass mailer code to use my new database field in the profile table.

I was a little confused with the naming convention.  Notifies.php is the mass mailer?  I added a field, checkbox; yes/no, to the edit profile using the profile fields builder; title of Newsletter.  I then edited the notifies.php to use the new field instead of EmailNotify.  This would not affect anything else, I am assuming that notifies.php just handles the mass mailer/newsletter?