Mass & personalised mailing

MailRules can be used for mass mailing by "pointing" MailRules at an external file and drawing message recipients from that file, rather than from the address book. This is made possible through MailRules Datasources. In this topic, we will show how to achieve a personalised mass mailer.

• Firstly, we will define a Datasource that draws email addresses from an Access query
• Secondly, we will define an Outbound Rule that uses this Datasource to generate personalised messages

In this demonstration, we use the Northwind database that is provided as a sample with Microsoft Access. We have added the query "Sales over 100,000" and also an additional field in the employees table to contain e-mail address.

1. Defining a Datasource

From the MailRules main menu, select Tools, then Datasources. The Datasource view will be displayed which shows all datasources already defined. Clicking on the name of a datasource will show the name of the fields within that datasource in the lower window. Click Create to begin the Datasource wizard. Select the appropriate file type (Microsoft Access *.mdb), browse to the file and click OK. MailRules will display what it finds in the database.

We click Show Queries, then Sales over 100,000 and MailRules will populate the grid with the results of the query.

When we click Next we will be prompted to enter a meaningful name for the Datasource, although you will notice that we have already entered one in the screenshot above. We will be returned to the Datasource view and our Datasource is now ready for use.

2. Using the datasource in an Outbound Rule

We start by creating an Outbound Rule by clicking the Add button on the Outbound Rule menu. MailRules shows us a blank Outbound Rule, the first thing we do is change the Rule Name to be more meaningful.

Next, we tick Recipients from Datasource and the Datasource view is displayed. Clicking on our Datasource lists the field names in the lower half of the Datsource view. Click on the e-mail field and click Select, we are returned to our Outbound Rule and can see that the To: recipient is no longer available and has been set to the e-mail field of our Datasource. Now that we have selected our recipients, we can enter the message body. Clicking the Field > button at any time will allow us to select any field from our Datasource and insert it into the message body - as soon as we have done this, the Outbound Rule will automatically perform the function of a mail merge and personalise the message.

We might like to schedule this Outbound Rule to be transmitted once a month, or we may choose to only ever send it on a manual basis - whichever we decide, we enter under When and then click OK to save our Outbound Rule.

What will happen now: Whenever the Outbound Rule is transmitted, the Datasource will be "opened" and the results of the query will be used to address individual e-mails to all the persons in the query.

Summary

In this topic you have seen:

• How to create a Datasource that provides e-mail addresses & other personal information (Create Datasource wizard)
• How to generate e-mail using a Datasource (Outbound Rule with Recipients from Datasource).