Bulk emailer & bad data remover solution

[Thomas Seidler]

You have several hundred or thousand email addresses on your system. From time to time you want to be able to easily mail selections of them about different things. Some of these email addresses are wrong and bounce back to you - they are too many to remove them from the database manually - but it needs to be done otherwise you may get blacklisted by servers for continually sending badly addressed mail and lose the ability to take advantage of this highly effective and free method of contacting folk.

If that's you then read on...

4 Files in attached stuffit archive are:

Filemaker Pro 5 files - all scripts are fully annotated.

PART 1: BULK EMAILER

File 1. ContactsList - comprising of two fields you would add to your Contacts/address book - you would just do a find in the email field for * (inserting this symbol in a text field will return you anything that is not empty), of course you may want to use other criteria too, we have a category 'nm' for no mailing and omit these from any find. Open scriptmaker and follow the script through, it calls an external script in>>>

File 2. Emailer - used to send & store emails and bulk emails sent. I have only included scripting on bulk email, but individual emailing is just a logical simplification (and all relevant fields and information has been left in). The 'perform applescript(using field value)' ability of Filemaker is the throbbing heart of the operation.

PART 2: BAD EMAIL DATA REMOVER

File 3. Bad Email Killer - this is the applescript you will need to run on all emails that bounce back as misdelivered. I have another rule which splits such emails into a seperate folder on arrival (e.g. From contains postmaster/mailer-daemon; subject contains misdelivery etc.). Then apply a rule that performs this applescript. You may need to edit it at the points the text comments indicate you should.

File 4. BadEmailData - this is where the data is stored from the returned messages. Create a folder on the desktop where the inbound emails arrive, name it 'Databases', ideally your hard disk will be named 'Macintosh HD' - then if you place this file in 'Databases' you will not need to alter the pathname in the applescript. Open scriptmaker, check the scripts - ClearBadEmailData - or something like that is the master - it will run 'kill duplicates' which does what it says. It works by a relationship with ContactsList based on 'BadEmailData(data) = ContactsList(email)' - then it runs a setfield(ContactsList::email; ""), thus breaking the relationship. I have placed the portal there purely to check it worked originially. Cos of the speed at which it breaks relationships, it doesn't always get out of the loop, and you may need to abort, and run it again!

RESPECT WHERE IT IS DUE

Maximum respect here belongs to Richard Dyce and MacUser, who taught me all this wonderful wild stuff in their workshops on Filemaker across many months.

:grin:

[Thomas Seidler]

there is a slight problem with the applescript at least on this... cos I updated it without running it, my mistake! But it does generally work pretty fine if you tweek it a little. And simplify the line that does not work in applescript. There maybe some problems in one of the Filemaker scripts as well, but nothing you won't be able to solve... if you can't let me know and I'll sort it and upload a fully working one