Using Webform to create an email tool in Drupal

One of the tools that is essential for almost any organization or campaign is letter or email writing tools. This provides an email service that can be customized and themed and keeps all email addresses in one location, instead of requiring a monthly subscription to a mail service like Mail Chimp or Constant Contact.

I like the idea of keeping everything in one place. Employees or volunteers can be granted permission on the site to send out emails, or the permission can be kept closed so only a select few have access to that tool. Email addresses can be added to multiple groups - donors, customers, press, newspaper editors, family - the choices allow for a very customizable email tool.

Webform is a very powerful Drupal module and one of my favorites because it serves so many purposes. With it I can build donor and volunteer forms, petitions, email forms, product and service order forms - again, the choices are numerous. It reduces the time it takes to customize a site because it reduces the amount of custom coding required. I guess I should add, saving time means saving money.

For the Letter to the Editor tool I built at Democratic Muse I didn't  theme the email to match my site because for this tool the emails are supposed to look like normal emails from the person writing the letter to the editor. Instead of coding the labels out of the email, I used them to my advantage. The label for the letter itself is titled, "Dear Editor" and that for the signature is titled, "Sincerely." 

One helper module I did add is the No Colon module.  It removes the colons from form labels which simply means my email label reads, "Dear Editor," instead of "Dear Editor:".