Sending an Email to 975 people at once

[gsmith2942]

I use a Mac and Outlook Express 5. I need to send a Email to 975 records in a found set. The Email address field is limited to 256k in size... not enough room for this many addresses. Any idea how to get around this limit?

[eremaut]

Hi,

With MS Outlook this limit is 32K. Are you sure about the 256K on Outlook Express?

Yes, if you have to launche big e-mailings like we do, you will find FM and MS Outlook crashing if you don't take precautions on this. The trick is ...

Build the emailer list yourself by going into a loop-script and concatenates the e-mail names with semicolon and spaces (from the found set) into a global field.

Check for size (If Length [gEmail_Concat] > 32000) not bigger then 32K (or 256K Express, check it out), if so stop the loop and send in pieces. Send the mail using the global field as the TO-field.

So something like this (don't mind the exact syntax here):

gEmail_Cat = ""

Loop

.

.

gEmail_Concat = gEmail_Concat & "; " & E_Mail

(for the first record use: gEmail_Concat = E_Mail)

.

Exit Loop if [sub_Check_32K]

.

Goto next record

End Loop

.

Send Mail

Offcourse this will take some processing power/time, but in our case MS Outlook and FM is no longer crashing and so we keep our sales guys happy !

Erwin

[Gerd Muller]

Hello

That's exactly what I did for a db of mine, too. Indeed, I use FileMaker only to open a empty e-mail to the found set. The e-mail body itself I'm writing in Outlook. So I don't use the mailto-function but the open URL, where you can also send emails to bcc-adresses.

Just to mention: if you don't want, that the recievers see all the e-mail adresses, use the bcc-adress. So, if you have the global field with all the e-mail adresses, delimited by comma, the two last steps will be:

setfield [gEmail_Contact ; "mailto:?bcc=" & gEmail_Contact]

open URL [without dialog ; gEmail_Contact]

Have fun

Gerd

[rrr]

Gerd wrote:

So I don't use the mailto-function but the open URL, where you can also send emails to bcc-adresses.

I have used this technique for a number of solutions. I have recently run into a problem, however, one client using this technique has upgraded to Mac OS X, which seems to enforce a 1024 character URL length limit. Now, if the mailto exceeds this length, the process fails. (This was not the case in Mac OS 9, apparently, as there was no problem sending mail to 150 addresses at once.)

Any ideas on how to work around this limit in an elegant fashion?

Thanks.

[andygaunt]

For all those Mac Users sending emails via filemaker.

you might want to look at this site. They have a lot of applescripts for sending mail.

Guaranteed everytime.

Great for mass mailings from filemaker.

http://www.fmfiles.com/dev8.html

HTH

[eremaut]

Hi,

Just testing ...