Awrighty, here's the story.
First, my client-user uses a content editor to create/edit both the HTML template framework for blasts, as well as individual content for each blast. So many customers have a templates like, "quick note" and "letterhead".
They also use my list manager to construct lists of people they'd want to blast for various reasons. Here we see a pretty standard email rule set, with the silly but illustrative demonstrations of adding two more fields to the rules. I reverse engineered this look from iTunes Smart Lists - it creates a stored procedure in the database, so that when an individual record changes, all lists are automatically updated.
Users then go to the blast manager. Here we can see a list of previous blasts they can edit/reuse or create new ones.
They select a template from what they've previously created...
... then select content for the body. Templates allow for any number of macros to dereferenced and content added/customized. In this case, there is only one macro for the main body content.
All HTML email require a text equivalent. Here we've selected the same HTML content, and I've stripped out the HTML tags and made it look right for the text portion of the MIME message.
Then we select a list from the list manager...
There are a couple details specific to each blast. A caption to be placed into each contact's memos, whether to use an SMTP relay or try to deliver directly to the recipients email server, or whether to us a word salad to change up the content and each email will no longer be the same. I have no idea why you'd want to do that
Before you can blast, all the rules I have defined must at least be in the yellow, if not green. I have ditched a couple of the things from the blast to demonstrate how a red light stops the blast from being able to go forward.
Finally! Everything acceptable, user must still click 3 useless checkboxes at the bottom for the "Execute" button to appear. I know that looks funky, but it helps me stop clients from making a mistake.
Once the execute button is clicked, I compile the user's instructions into a job record, recipient records etc as described above. Then the cron job, now having something to do, will fire off dispatchlets to get it done.
My newer version allows for custom code to be called against every record, custom attachments, images, immediate adjustment of recips/minute, blast priority (so that even if you have 50K pieces going out, if you suddenly realize you want to get a press release out for (that) client, you can put it above the marketing email) and such, as well as an instant email test button which I foolishly left out in this version.
It's even prettier
