How Do I Email My Wordpress Commenters

Have you every wanted to send out an email to all your commenters in one shot? Maybe you have something real important to say, such as your blog site address will be changing soon, etc. For whatever the reason, there may come a time where you would like to send an email to all the people that have commented on your blog. This article will show you how you can quickly attain the email address of everyone who has commented on your blog. Please do keep in mind, I am providing this as a blogging tip, not a way to spam people. Remember who you are emailing, if you end up pissing your commenters off, they won’t comment anymore. If you do send out an email to your commenters, you should invite them to opt in and subscribe to a newsletter. All in all, if you choose to email all your commenters, make sure it is really important. Otherwise they will feel like you are spamming them. This article is designed for self hosted WordPress users who have access to phpMyAdmin.

• Step One: Log into phpMyAdmin and click databases. You should see a screen like this:
  
• Step Two: when you open the database view, select the database that runs your Wordpress install. If there is more than one database to choose from and you don’t know which one is for your blog, you can easily log into FTP and view the wp-config.php file off the blog root directory.
• Step Three: Once you have the correct database open. Click on the “Browse Button” under the wp_comments table. Here is a screen shot:
  
• Step Four: After clicking the browse button, you should now be presented with a new screen. This new screen (depending on configuration) should display about 30 commenters per page. You can easily get them all to display on one page by adjusting the show number. If the page loads too slow you might want to divide the commenter entries into two pages. After the page loads then click print view. See screen shot below:
  
• Step Five: Now that you are displaying the list of commenters in print view, open up that trusty old copy of FrontPage or Dreamweaver. The print view page displays all the information in a standard HTML table. Copy the entire table and then paste it into a new page in FrontPage/DreamWeaver. You can easily do this by right clicking on the screen and selecting all and then copy. See screen shots below:
  
  
• Step Six: Once you paste the entire contexts of the print view page into FrontPage or DreamWeaver, you can now start removing all the columns that aren’t needed. The only column you need is the column that has the email addresses in it. The final result is a table with only one column. See screen shot:
  
• Step Seven: Now that you have all columns removed except for the column containing the emails. You can now select all the content in the table and copy it to your clipboard and then paste it into a text document. I would suggest using TextPad. With TextPad, there are tools that will check for duplicate email addresses and remove them from your list. All in all, this is how you can extract all the email addresses from your MySQL database that runs your WordPress blog.

In order to email everyone in this list, you can use GMail, Outlook Express, etc.. Ideally it would be good to use TextPad to add a comma after each email address per line. Then from there you have yourself a flat file for importing into a newsletter program (either web based or desktop application). All in all… from this point on, you can do what you want with the list. I just wanted to save you a lot of time and show you how to extract the email addresses for your constructive and professional use. Have fun and feel free to drop me a comment with any questions you may have.

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