bulk email w attachments?

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bartelstx
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Joined: Tue Jul 14, 2009 4:11 am
Type the middle number, please (202): 202

bulk email w attachments?

Post by bartelstx »

We have several donors who receive only a PDF version of our newsletter ... and we'd like to include the PDF file as an attachment to an email to each one. How to do it? Our initial tries have omitted the attached file.

To re-phrase ... we'd like for DM to
- use a filter to select specific donors (we've gotten this far)
- send an email message to each of those donors (we're trying, but haven't succeeded in having DM do all the work here, including sending the actual email (we use Outlook 2003).
- attach a PDF file to each of those email messages. (we've not figured out how to do this).

Thanks for a really great program.

eb
Rclip
Posts: 6
Joined: Sun Jan 03, 2010 3:45 am
Type the middle number, please (202): 202

Re: bulk email w attachments?

Post by Rclip »

Just a thought,

What if you used a filter to select the donors you wished to send the e-mail to, then exported the data in a comma separated values file (the third option of the three export options) and then open the comma separated values file and copy the e-mail addresses into Outlook. Then you could just open a new e-mail, paste in the e-mail addresses, add the attachments, and send the e-mail using Outlook.

My only questions about whether this would work is the kind of filter you're using, does it select just the donor name and e-mail address, or all the information?

What I just figured out you can do is this:

Export the data into a comma separated values format (.csv format), open the .csv file in Excel, select the column all the e-mail addresses are in, Ctrl-C copy them, and then in Outlook, start a new e-mail, click "To" and Ctrl-V paste the addresses in.

One quick note, the csv format fiel that is exported is in .txt format. Excel seemed to have trouble reading that when I just tried it (because .txt is a text file format), so I just renamed the file with the extension .csv . Then Excel could open it with no trouble.

Hope this helps,

-Rclip

P.S. Feel free to ask for more detailed directions, I was just trying to give a general idea of how one could do this sort of thing.
bbbacheller
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Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2009 1:49 am
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Re: bulk email w attachments?

Post by bbbacheller »

Bartelstx, I have the same issue. It would be nice to have it all combined seamlessly into one or two steps, but as it is right now, we have to attach the PDF to each email that is sent. Furthermore, many ISP's out there don't allow their users to receive an email that has more than 10 addressees in it. It's a bummer, as we're not really doing SPAM, but it's viewed as SPAM by the email providers. What I've resorted to doing for now is to only send 9 email addresses at a time in one email message, and attach that PDF to the email. It makes for a dull, long process, but at least it's free, and we can keep track of the information ourselves. Don't know if John (DM creator) would be able to do anything about the PDF attachment issue, that's outside of his program. Not much consolation, but that's where we're at for now.

Ben.
rriggs
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Sep 11, 2008 7:35 pm

Re: bulk email w attachments?

Post by rriggs »

There is a tool that is called MailMergeTool that will allow you to attach documents to your emails. It works with any of the office programs like Outlook, Word, Excel. It is free to try but you must purchase it for $24.00 if you want to continue using it or want to do over 50 emails. It does what you are wanting to do and you do not have to do all the export to Excel and message data sources to achieve the results. In other words, it makes adding attachments very easy.
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