how do I email...grrr

[LauraLu]

Hello there. I am new to FileMaker and I was wondering if anyone knows how to send out a mass email. I am basically computer illiterate so lots of detail would be greatly appreciated. My boss would like me to email our clients with all of their contact information so it can be updated. We are using outlook express. Please help!

[Matthew F]

Take a look at the "Send Mail" script step. It is fairly self explanatory. You probably want to have an "address book" table with a new record for each individual on your mailing list. One field should be the email address of the recipients. In the Send Mail script step specify which field has the addresses in it and specify that you want to send mail to all of the addresses in the found set. Paste your email text into the message box. Alternatively you can reference a global text field, or text in a related record.

Before sending mail perform a find to access the names that you want to mail to. Then run your script. There are a lot more options, obviously, so you can modify things quite a bit.

[Steve T.]

Howdy, L! I agree w/mfero... ScriptMaker's SEND MAIL is what you want and it will work with your computer's default mail application (you may want to have it open and running when you launch the script).

Now, it looks like you want to customize the message, though, right? I'd suggest making a calculation field to compose your custom message... something like

mailbodyfield =

"Dear " & firstname & ":" & (Pmark Pmark) & "Please verify the following contact information: " & (Pmark Pmark) & firstname & " " & lastname & (Pmark) & phonenumber

and then use that as the body of your message. the (Pmark) is the paragraph mark symbol you can use when defining calculation fields. The calc field should have TEXT as its answer and you should view the calc field in its entirety on your layout before trying to send it as mail. Once you have the calc field as you would like it, then make the script. Or test the script with static text to see if you can get it working first, and then deal with the calc.

ScriptMaker's kinda funky if you haven't used it before but you should be able to get the hang of it without too much trouble. One thing I always found strange was the "restore" references. If you script a FIND, for example, you can have the script use whatever FIND you last peformed and it will "just remember" that for the script. So if you have a field "sendmemail" and mark your records that you want to receive the message, perform a FIND on "sendmemail" and then go to ScriptMaker to compose your script. Enter a FIND step and it will let you choose to use your last performed find (restore). Then add your Send Mail command and define the TO: CC: Subject:, etc. If you decide to skip the "sendmemail" field and marking system, I think the script will send mail to whomever you have in your FOUND SET.

I'd suggest practicing w/a small sample database first or you may have to wait as your Outlook generates thousands of messages on screen because you forgot to only have a few records in your found set.

Good luck!

--ST

[Ron Barter]

I've been having a similar difficulty; only I'm a little further along in this frustrating exercise.

Any suggestions to remedy Error 1503, "Error with SSL" ? I'm Okay with the E-mail client, but cannot get SMTP to perform...

Anyone seen and successfully worked around this issue? The effort is on behalf of a not-for-profit enterprise, I hope an answer lies in FMP Advanced 11 and I won't have to shop and adopt a third-party workaround.

Thanks in advance for your assistance!