Datasources Overview

A MailRules Datasource allows you to establish certain details of an Outbound Rule (Recipients, message body and file attachments) from an external source. The external source is either a properly formatted text file, a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or a Microsoft Access database table or query.

Before anyone closes this page of the helpfile fearing that a Datasource (with its talk about text files and databases) will be too hard to implement, creating a Datasource is a simple task and you are walked through the process by a specially designed wizard.

Here are some uses for a Datasource:

• A Datasource may contain a list of e-mail addresses for sending multiple messages.
• A Datasource can include text fields that can be inserted into the body of an Outbound Rule, which gives the functionality of a MailMerge document (a whole section of the helpfile is dedicated to explaining how to create a MailMerge, but you need to understand how to create a Datasource first).
• A Datasource may contain a list of file names that you want to send with an outbound message. Your Datasource needs to provide a field with the full path to the files - you can even use the wildcard characters * and ?