Mass Mailing Tutorial

(Our thanks to David Tebbutt for this article)

First of all, it is simple.

You need addresses for the mailing - email at the minimum, email and first name preferable, email and full name is even better. If you are sending different emails to different groups of people, create address groups in your address book

The email structure begins with the  Addressee. This is taken care of by choosing a group of addresses for your email. If the First name and Last name are present, this makes the To: line look nicer. If there's no First name - eg Dr, Mrs or initials - put them in the Middle name and leave the First name blank. (You'll see why when you get to "Salutation")

Now you need to start creating Quick Templates - in the Options menu

1) Subject

%SUBJECT="Example mailing"

You put your own words in, of course.

Whatever is between quote marks appears in the Subject line of your email

2) Salutation

Another Quick Template - call it Salute perhaps?

If you make it conditional upon the presence of a first name, it will save you the embarrassment of seeing "Dear ," in your email. In fact, in the absence of any names, it will use the email address as if it were a name.  You could then end up with messy salutations like Dear sexything32@aol.,

Here's a possible format:

%IF:"%TONAME"="%TOADDR":"":"Dear %TOFNAME,

"

And, yes, that last quote is important, it completes the instructions. Ignore the percentages.  It means If the Name used in the To: Field was the same as the To: email address then type nothing ("") otherwise type "Dear Firstname,

" (At this point the body of the letter starts)

If your address book includes a name for every entry in the mass mailing group the salutation can be simplified. In this case the template for the salutation could be

Dear %ABtoFIRSTNAME

or

Dear %ABtoLASTTNAME

3) The words

I would create a Quick Template containing the words you want to see in the body of the letter.

Call it Body

4) Signature

This is where you terminate the email with your preferred signature. Best to do it as a Quick Template, call it Sig perhaps.

For now do something like this:

--

Kind regards,

David & Marck

www.mywebsite.com

The first line (-- ) is actually hyphen-hyphen-space

Each of these can be set up as quick templates.  And maybe an extra one to hold it all together:

5) The whole mail quick template

Make another template to tie the previous four together. Call it Whole and it will look like this:

%QINCLUDE="Subject"

%QINCLUDE="Salute"

%QINCLUDE="Body"

%QINCLUDE="Sig"

Don't forget to tick the "Use for New messages/Mass mailing" check box for this one!

To send the emails, just go to the address book and select the group to receive the mailing

Click on File / Mass mailing using template

Choose the template (Whole in my example)

You will be given commonsense choices (like Put in Outbox) and away you go