Email everyone in my table

[mvau50]

I'm sure this may have been hit on many times, so you'll have to please excuse me for asking an over-answered question. I looked at a number of posts and didn't find necessarily what I was looking for. Basically I need to do this:

I have a DB with a single table (not the most advanced DB, I know). It has 4500+ contact records. Some have email addresses entered, some not. I need to see how to make a script to open a new email window from my email client (Outlook 2010) with everyone's email address (every record with an email entered) in the BCC field so we can send newsletters.

Also, we need to send other mass emails based on a Y/N entry in certain fields. Same thing, BCC in an Outlook field.

Any assistance on this would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[VincentO'B]

Hi mvau50

Firstly adding 4000+ emails in a BCC field is a not a good idea it will almost certainly fail at the first bad email address as well as bringing your mail client to its knees.

In short you need to create a script that first finds the records that you want to mail ie. excludes those with no email addresses and loop through them grabbing the email address from each, have a look at the Send Mail script step to see all the options available.

You can choose between using a mail client or sending directly to a SMTP server, with this many emails SMTP may be the best option.

If you choose email client you have a further option of sending them with or without dialogue, if you choose 'with dialogue' you will open an email window for each record again having 4000 windows open will be no fun.

You may run into problems with the size of the email, you mention a Newsletter, if it is 1Mb in size then your mail run will be about 4Gb, you may have data bottlenecks with your mail service, you will benefit from having your own Mail Server on your local network simply because the time involved in transfering 4Gb mail to your ISPs mail server is not inconsiderable.

Hope this helps to avoid some pitfalls.

Vincent.

[mvau50]

Thanks Vincent. Can you point me in the direction of using this feature? I know it a bit in FMP, however my biggest challenge is to get it to run through my entire table and snag the email addresses. Then, for other newsletters, to run through and only get the email addresses that have a Y or N in certain fields.

Thanks,

MV

[bcooney]

I thought to point to or create a demo for you, but it's not clear what a "newsletter" is. Is it an attached PDF? A link to a website? Simply text in the email?

I any case, you'd simply Find and then Loop.

[mvau50]

I thought to point to or create a demo for you, but it's not clear what a "newsletter" is. Is it an attached PDF? A link to a website? Simply text in the email?

I any case, you'd simply Find and then Loop.

I think we're dealing with a PDF at this point. A demo would be infinitely helpful. I'm familiar with loops and if statements, however I've been out of code writing for some time and making it jive with FMP is what I'm scratching my head with. Thanks for any help.

[bcooney]

Demo attached (smtp setting in Send Mail script step needs to be your own). However, Vincent points out that just because you can easily script this, you may still have trouble. ISPs are on the lookout for spammers, and if you get blacklisted, you're in for a world of frustration. You might consider exporting a list to a service, ie. Constant Contact.

EmailList.fp7.zip

[mvau50]

Thanks for your help and demo bcooney. I'll give this a shot.

Thanks again!

[mvau50]

Demo attached (smtp setting in Send Mail script step needs to be your own). However, Vincent points out that just because you can easily script this, you may still have trouble. ISPs are on the lookout for spammers, and if you get blacklisted, you're in for a world of frustration. You might consider exporting a list to a service, ie. Constant Contact.

Quick question, is FMP able to send newletters in the body of the outgoing message? With graphs, pictures, etc. Or just straight text only?

[bcooney]

Plain text only. Plugins required for html emails and 1+ attachments.

[David Jondreau]

There's several incredibly good reasons why this is a bad idea. You should use an e-mail marketing service. I prefer MailChimp, but Constant Contact and iContact seem to be popular too.

A 5 minute video of why is here.

But the short version is:

By sending marketing e-mail directly from your machine, or even from your mail servers via SMTP, you will get blacklisted by your ISP or your ISP itself will be blacklisted. If you're in the US, without proper disclaimers and controls (your mailing address, an unsubscribe link, etc), you could be prosecuted under the anti-spam laws at $10K an e-mail (though the Feds often give you a warning the first time). On your first mailing of 3,000 sends, you'll have several hundred failures (bounces, incorrectly formatted address). How will you handle those and all the unsubscribes? And finally, how are you going to measure the success of your campaign? Do you have the ability to track the number of opens and click throughs? And pdfs? The vast majority of uers don't want to open a pdf, they want a newsletter formatted in the e-mail itself, but that takes some skill to design a well formatted marketing e-mail.

Any good e-mail marketing service will handle all of the above. Sign up for MailChimp, pay the $50-$100. Design the newsletter with their template. Follow their instructions. Export your addresses to a csv and upload. They'll take care of the rest. You will not regret it.