Exporting to MAC's Address Book

[sburech]

I have 200 records with names, addresses, phone numbers and emails. I would like to export these records to MAC's Address Book Application so I can send emails via MAC's Mail application to the entire group. Can anyone advise how this may be done or if it can be done without recopying each record's data into the Address Book application?

[Steven H. Blackwell]

You can send the emails from FIleMaker Pro directly.

I believe Productive Computing has a plug-in that allows communication with the Address Book.

Steven

[sburech]

Thanks for your prompt reply. If possible, I wouldn't mind sending the emails directly from my FileMaker Pro 7, but I assume that will require a plug-in, since I find nothing in the FMP7 menu supporting emails. Could you recommend an email plug-in for FMP7 that will allow me to send emails to the email addresses in my records along with pdf attachments? Remember I am a newbee, so I would appreciate something simple.

[Reed]

There are several plugins if you want to use fmp 7 to send directly to an smtp server (smtpit from cns and mail.it from dacons are the most popular).

If you don't want to use a plugin, fmp 7 can send email directly via the send mail script step in scriptmaker. It just does it via the default mail client (like OS X Mail.app) I've done it that way for years, and send thousands of emails at a time to all the members of our group.

[Fenton]

It's the "Send Mail" script step. It is pretty straightforward to set up, if you've ever set up an email account in Mail; pretty much same info and settings.

FileMaker 10+ lets you set up FileMaker to Send Mail via SMTP directly. SMTP does not need/or/use an email client, it just sends it. But for what you're doing, you can just use Send Mail as is. It clutters up your Sent mailbox though.

There is currently an option to Send to the Found Set; don't remember when they added that, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't there in FileMaker 7.

But you can do the same thing easily enough, using a Loop.

Set Error Capture ["On"] <-- do not add this until AFTER testing the Loop below

Go To Record/Request [First]

Loop

   Send Mail

   If [ Get (LastError) ≠ 0 ]

      * do something with failed Send Mail (funky email address?), stick them in a list (maybe the "Sent" table below)

   Else

      * create a record in a "Sent" table to keep your own history

   End If

   Go To Record/Request [Next; Exit after last] <-- you need this option

End Loop

If you store your own Sends in FileMaker, then you'll be able to delete them from the Sent mailbox in Mail. Both FileMaker and Mail are good at this. The loop goes pretty fast.

P.S. One way to test is to create a bunch of records, using your email address(es). Then run the loop to send them to yourself.

[sburech]

I upgraded to FMP 11 but it seems to want to send the same email to each person. I created a table of persons with email addresses and then a letter table which relates their grade and scores for each period from another related layout. Each letter goes to each person and is unique to that person. I need help in doing this.