Mass Emailing Multiple Recipients Program
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Mass Emailing Multiple Recipients Program |
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Owning a
translation agency for many years, I found myself in the habit of writing
mass emails to many translators at a time. A large project would come in, I
would need to approach many people, and over time I developed my system of doing
so.
In the beginning, I would use Word's Search and Replace tool to convert the list of emails into one line of text, with each email address separated by a comma, so that I could simply copy/paste the list into the BCC (blind carbon copy) field of my email client. But there were two problems with this: 1) contrary to assumption, these email addresses were NOT hidden to some email clients. Meaning that some of my translators could see the long list of email addresses, meaning I was giving away such a valuable list, not to mention disclosing the private information, which some translators could object to; and 2) many email servers nowadays would consider such a mass BCC emailing as spam, meaning that many of the recipients would simply not receive your email.
For this purpose I stumbled on the free
version of Groupmail by Infacta. With this software you can send one hundred
emails at a time (the paid version with an unlimited number of emails costs 100
dollars). The advantage of sending mail like this is that each email is sent
individually. So if you do intend to send out an email to a large list of
recipients, it would be better to send them individually like this, to ensure
that they all receive it.
The software also allows for fields, as explained below, but does not allow for
fancy message formatting or easy manipulation of attached files, so I find my
simple script far superior to theirs.
If you do not want to use Groupmail Free and keep creating a new list of 100
email addresses but intend to send out many many emails, you can download our
free software here (right click and press Save
Target As if it does not want to automatically save) and try your luck with that.
You will find all the instructions in one of the sheets of the Excel file. If
you do not know how to unzip the file, you can go to our
download translation programs page. One of my programmers informed
me that such a script was so simple it really did not make sense to try and sell
it, so I decided I will offer it for free for the purpose of increasing web
traffic (for
search
engine optimization purposes), and in the hopes that someone may be
interested in our
programming services. I have a lot of quality programmers keen for work and
who are located in inexpensive countries, so my prices are quite competitive
(from 10 dollars an hour).
Here is a brief explanation of the mass emailing software we developed:
works directly from an Excel file. Certain columns are used for certain fields, such as "First Name", "Last name", so if you are fortunate to have this information, you can custom set each mail differently for each recipient.
the list has no limitations, and will generate an error report at the end in case some of the email addresses were faulty.
the body of the email message draws its information from an .html file, which you can edit yourself. This means that, with a simple program such as Frontpage, you can create your outgoing emails in a fancy format, complete with tables and graphics, to really impress your recipients. Most email clients allow turning off html formatting if the recipient wants to view an email as plain text only, but giving your potential clients a choice and potentially impressing them could give you an added advantage and bang to your message.
if you want to send any attachments with your email, there is a folder for this purpose where you can copy any number of files. Simply delete the contents of this folder if you do not want to send any attachments.
The script works based on your Outlook Express account settings. It works on my server, but I have not sold it to anyone yet, so you may have to play with it to get it working on your own computer. In any case, you will first want to test it out on some dummy email accounts before sending out a mass emailing, to make sure it works properly and to work out any kinks. I can help you with this, as I am interested in finding out any potential problems.
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Translation
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