Do I buy an add in or write code myself ...

[Jon Rowlan]

I have a customer that wants to collect his 50,000 or so emails from
potential customers that he has been building up and and use them as a
targeted mail shot.

He wants it to be very simple.

I'd like to do 2 things ..

a) When viewing an email from a potential in Outlook, I'd like to give him a
button to click to "add to database". This would present a dialogue where he
can choose a category and then it gets added to a specified contact list in
Outlook with the category code in one of the user fields.

b) Later on he will want to compose an HTML mailshot and to be able to send
to groups of contacts based upon the category that is relevant. He is dead
keen on making his mailshots carefully targeted.


Is there software that offers this already either from Microsoft or a third
party that anyone knows of or should I just write the code myself. I can
write the function for option a) quite easily in VBA but the composition of
an HTML email seems more a job for an established piece of software.

Any ideas anyone?

many thanks,

jON

 

[Brian Tillman]

I'd like to do 2 things ..

a) When viewing an email from a potential in Outlook, I'd like to
give him a button to click to "add to database". This would present a
dialogue where he can choose a category and then it gets added to a
specified contact list in Outlook with the category code in one of
the user fields.
b) Later on he will want to compose an HTML mailshot and to be able
to send to groups of contacts based upon the category that is
relevant. He is dead keen on making his mailshots carefully targeted.

Outlook by itself can come close. When you have a message open to read, you
can right-click the addresses in the headers and choose Add to Contacts. A
Contact form will open and you can enter the category and fill in whatever
other information you want, then save and close the form.

Later, you can use mail merge to send to selected people in your Contacts or
you can display your Contacts in a By Category view, select the category you
want, and click Actions>New Message to Contact to include everyone in the
category in the recipient list.

Is there software that offers this already either from Microsoft or a
third party that anyone knows of or should I just write the code
myself. I can write the function for option a) quite easily in VBA
but the composition of an HTML email seems more a job for an
established piece of software.

You can also see if something here helps:
http://www.slipstick.com/addins/mail.htm#massmail