experience Generating e-mail

Ronald Zellner zellner at tamu.edu
Sat May 21 13:54:34 EDT 2011


My intent in asking the question was to focus on technical advice but I understand how the spamming issue came in so quickly.
I guess the nature of the recipient list and the intent of the mailings is at the heart of the issue, the process is pretty much the same no matter what.  It is a question of whether the mailings are intrusive or not, and not everyone agrees on that.

If I want to send out a mass mailing I can easily put all the addresses in a comma delimited list and paste it in the "To:" or "Bcc:" window.  Or use my Address book to manage them.

In this case I'm using it for a research project where each message needs different content related to the additional fields in the row, consequently, I need to generate a series of individual e-mails.

revMail works well for adapting the content (using tabbed data in a field) and creating the individual messages with a repeat loop.

Yes, I need to switch to Mac Mail and then send each one individually, but that is relatively simple compared to trying to create each one there in the first place.

So, while I have a lot of recipients I feel these requests are legitimate, or at least not considered spam simply because I am using LC to generate them.

The only feature that I would like to add, but cannot at this time, is to have the text in the resulting messages formatted: font size, color, bold, etc.

One last observation on spamming:  Many years ago in the early use of the Internet,  a doctor in a university dental program sent out requests for people to complete a survey.  He was quite polite and simply explained the request, assured that no follow-up would be sent, and said that you should simply delete his message if you did not choose to participate.  I chose to participate and found it was a very insightful use of digital photos to gather useful input from the general public.  However, when I tried to demonstrate this site to my research class it was no longer available.  I soon learned that some "programmer types" had received the same request, considered it to be intrusive, and desired to address it by distributing a program that overwhelmed his site.  The researcher was forced to abandon the project.

Ron


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