Newsletters. These are periodic (perhaps every few months) and are sent to all participants. Typically you would use them to summarize your project's results, to discuss its future plans, to make announcements, etc.

Reminders. These are sent to participants who seem to have stopped computing to your project, or who signed up but never got any credit. Typically they would be short messages, encouraging the participant to take a specific action.

Friend-to-friend. These are sent by participants to their friends and family, to tell them about your project and urge them to join. The sender can add an optional message. Effective use of all types of email is critical to maintaining and growing your participant base. In the absence of any email, participation typically decreases by a few percent every month. BOINC supplies the framework, but you must write the actual emails, or modify BOINC's samples as needed for your project. .

The newsletter and reminder scripts provide the following features:

They let you send different emails to different 'classes' of participants. For example, you can send a different newsletter to participants who haven't computed for your project in a while.
They let you personalize emails, e.g. by inserting the participant's name or their total credit.
They provide a mechanism for inserting a secure 'opt-out' link. Note: You should ALWAYS include an 'opt-out' link at the bottom of emails (both HTML and text). In may be illegal for you to do a mass email without one. Make sure you test this link.

The scripts requires that you use PHPMailer, is a PHP function for sending mail that's more full-featured than the one built into PHP. Download it, put it in html/inc, and set the USE_PHPMAILER, PHPMAILER_HOST, and PHPMAILER_MAILER variables in your project.inc file.

All of the tools let you send multipart HTML/text messages. We recommend that you use this feature - and HTML message can include your logo and/or institutional insignia, can include hyperlinks, and can look more attractive.

The general procedure for using each scripts is:

Create a directory (mass_email, reminder_email, or ffmail) in your html/ops/ directory. In that directory, create separate files for the text body template, HTML body template, and subject line to be sent to each class of participants. NOTE: the HTML files are optional; if you leave them out, text-only emails will be sent.
Run the script in testing mode (see below) to ensure that the emails are as you intend.
Once testing is complete, run the script in production mode. Typically, the newsletter script is run from the command line. The reminder script is typically run as a periodic task, every 24 hours or so.

The newsletter and reminder scripts use the recent-average credit (expavg_credit) field in the user table. To make sure this value is accurate, run update_stats manually if you're not running it as a periodic task.

Personalizing emails

The newsletter and reminder scripts replace the following macros in your email bodies (both HTML and text): "; list_start(); list_item("<name/>", "User name"); list_item("<create_time/>", "When account was created (D M Y)"); list_item("<total_credit/>", "User's total credit"); list_item("<opt_out_url/>", "URL for opting out (this URL includes a salted version of the participant's account key, and so is different for every participant). "); list_item("<lapsed_interval/>", "The number of days since user's client contacted server (defined only for lapsed users, see below)." ); list_item("<user_id/>", "The user ID (use this to form URLs)" ); list_end(); echo "

Avoiding spam filtering

Your email is less likely to be rejected by spam filters if:

Your HTML and text versions have the same text.
Your HTML version either contains no images, or has at least 400 words.

Newsletters

The script html/ops/mass_email_script.php is for sending email newsletters. The script categorize participants as follows:

Failed: zero total credit. These people failed to download and install the client software, or failed to get it working (e.g. because of proxy problems) or uninstalled it before finishing any work.
Lapsed: nonzero total credit but recent average credit < 1: These people did work in the past, but none recently.
Current: recent average credit >= 1. These are your active participants.

To use the script, create the following files in html/ops/mass_email: "; list_start(); list_item("failed_html", "HTML message sent to failed users. Example: ".html_text( " Dear :

Test Project continues to do pioneering computational research in the field of Submandibular Morphology. In recent months we have discovered over 17 new varieties of Frombats.

Our records show that you created a Test Project account on but that your computer hasn't completed any work. Possibly you encountered problems installing or using the software. Many of these problems have now been fixed, and we encourage you to visit our web site, download the latest version of the software, and try again.

To not receive future emails from Test Project, >click here. " )." "); list_item("failed_text", "Text message sent to failed users. Example: ".html_text(" Dear : Test Project continues to do pioneering computational research in the field of Submandibular Morphology. In recent months we have discovered over 17 new varieties of Frombats. Our records show that you created a Test Project account on but that your computer hasn't completed any work. Quite possibly you encountered problems installing or using the software. Many of these problems have now been fixed, and we encourage you to visit our web site, download the latest version of the software, and try again. To not receive future emails from Test Project, visit " )." "); list_item("email_failed_subject", "Subject line sent to failed users. Example: 'Test Project News'. "); list_item("lapsed_html", "HTML message sent to lapsed users"); list_item("lapsed_text", "Text message sent to lapsed users"); list_item("lapsed_subject", "Subject line sent to lapsed users"); list_item("current_html", "HTML message sent to current users"); list_item("current_text", "Text message sent to current users"); list_item("current_subject", "Subject line sent to current users"); list_end(); echo "

Testing

Test your email before sending it out to the world. As distributed, mass_email_script.php has the following variables defined near the top:

\$testing = true;

Set it to false to actually send emails (rather than just print to stdout).

\$userid = 1;

If this is nonzero, email will be sent to the given user ID; Otherwise it will be sent to all users.

To start, set \$userid to the ID of your own user record. Run the script by typing

php mass_email_script.php

It will print (to stdout) the contents of all three email types (failed, lapsed, and current). Verify that the subject, HTML and text are correct.

Then set \$testing = false and run the script again. You'll get three emails; check them.

Then set \$testing = false and \$userid = 0, create an empty file called mass_email/log (see below), and run the script. You'll get voluminous output to stdout, but no emails will be sent. Control-C it quickly if you want. Make sure that each user is being sent the right type of email.

When you're sure that everything is correct, set \$testing = false, set mass_email/log to empty, and run the script. It will now send mass emails. Depending on the size of your user table, it may take hours or days to complete. You can control-C it and restart whenever you want; it automatically picks up where it left off (see below).

Checkpoint/restart

mass_email_script.php manages checkpoint/restart when dealing with large numbers of participants. Mails are sent in order of increasing user ID. The file mass_email/log has a list of IDs that have been processed. On startup, the script reads this file, finds the last entry, and starts from there.

If you are starting a mass email from the beginning, empty the file mass_email/log; i.e.

truncate mass_email/log

Reminder emails

The script html/ops/remind.php is for sending reminder emails. The script categorizes users as follows.

Failed: the account was created at least 14 days ago, has zero total credit, and hasn't received a reminder email in 30 days. These people typically either had a technical glitch, or their hardware and/or preferences didn't allow sending them work, or the application crashed on their host. The reminder email should direct them to a web page that helps them fix these problems.
Lapsed: the user has positive total credit, hasn't done a scheduler RPC in the past 60 days, and hasn't been sent a reminder email in the past 30 days. They probably stopped running BOINC or detached this project. The reminder email should gently prod them to start running BOINC and attach to this project again.

The numbers 14, 30, and 60 are all parameters in the script; edit it to change them.

To use the script, create the following files in html/ops/reminder_email/: "; list_start(); list_item("failed_html", "HTML message sent to failed users"); list_item("failed_text", "Text message sent to failed users"); list_item("failed_subject", "Subject line sent to failed users"); list_item("lapsed_html", "HTML message sent to lapsed users"); list_item("lapsed_text", "Text message sent to lapsed users"); list_item("lapsed_subject", "Subject line sent to lapsed users"); list_end(); echo "

remind.php can be run as often as you like. We recommend running it every hours, specifying it as a task in config.xml. When it sends email to a user, it stores the time in their database record, and won't send them another email for at least 30 days. For this reason, it has no checkpoint/restart mechanism.

The procedure for testing your reminder email is similar to that for email newsletters (see above).

Friend-to-friend emails

The web page ffemail_form.php lets users send emails to their friends. To use this feature, you must create the following files in html/ops/ffmail/: "; list_start(); list_item("subject", "The subject line used for friend-to-friend emails"); list_item("html", "HTML template for friend-to-friend emails"); list_item("text", "Text template for friend-to-friend emails"); list_end(); echo " Samples are supplied for each of these. The following macros are substituted in the message bodies: "; list_start(); list_item("<fromname/>", "The name of the sender"); list_item("<toname/>", "The name of the recipient"); list_item("<comment/>", "The comment supplied by the sender"); list_end(); page_tail(); ?>