I'm hoping This is the Right Place

[Jon]

My company uses a program called Cactus which uses a Word Mail Merge
function to send letters to our clients. I have spoken to the technicians
of the program and am assured that there is no setting for this in the
system and that it is a Word function. The deal is - for a long time the
Mail Merge of these letters would be sent as the body of the email. Now,
they are sent as an attachment and not everyone can read them since they
don't all use Microsoft Office and be able to open a Word attachment. Is
there a setting in the Mail Merge function that tells the letter to go in as
the email body instead of an attachment and if so where is it?

Any help would be greatly appreciated -
Jon

 

[Peter Jamieson]

My company uses a program called Cactus which uses a Word Mail Merge

function to send letters to our clients. I have spoken to the technicians
of the program and am assured that there is no setting for this in the
system and that it is a Word function. The deal is - for a long time the
Mail Merge of these letters would be sent as the body of the email. Now,
they are sent as an attachment and not everyone can read them since they
don't all use Microsoft Office and be able to open a Word attachment. Is
there a setting in the Mail Merge function that tells the letter to go in
as the email body instead of an attachment and if so where is it?

OK, it's difficult from what you're saying to understand what this means:

I have spoken to the technicians of the program and am assured that there
is no setting for this in the system and that it is a Word function.

Assuming that what they are saying is that there is nothing in /their/
system that lets you define what format your e-mails should go out in (is
that assumption correct?) then
a. something in a part of your system that they do not control is
determining what format to use
b. something has changed.

Yes, Word Mailmerge can merge to e-mail in one of three formats:
c. Plain text: the content of your mail merge main document is rendered as
plain text and inserted as the body of a plain text e-mail
d. Attachment: the content of your mail merge main document is rendered as
a Word document and attached to an e-mail that has a completely blank
message body
e. HTML: the content of your mail merge main document is rendered as a MIME
format e-mail that will probably appear as the body of the message in some
e-mail clients.

Things that might have changed include:
f. your default email package has been changed to one that does not support
HTML (AFAIK you need to merge via the full Outlook to have HTML-format
message bodies - no other email client does it)
g. your Word mail merge main documents are set up with the output
destination and format predefined, but a change in the way Word works now
means that one or more of those definitions are discarded and some other
default defintion (i.e. "use an attachment") is used.

IMO both (f) and (g) are both possible, especially given one or two recent
changes to Word, but it's difficult to know how to determine the cause. I
wouldn't discount the possibility that "the technicians" are reassuring but
wrong, either.

Some starting points...
a. are there any options in the Cactus system that let you specify the
merge format, or the email client to use?
b. who creates the word template/skeleton documents that you are using?
yourselves/
c. can you check that your default mail program in Windows is still
Outlook?
d. forgetting about the cactus system altogether, what happens if you try
to construct a test merge to e-mail, using HTML format (e.g. send it to
yourself)?

 

[Jon]

Peter,

Thank you very much for your Reply. It really is appreciated. Your
assumptions are correct with what I was saying in my previous post. The
'technicians I spoke to' does refer to Cactus Techs and they are telling me
that their program - Cactus - does not control the way the letters are
merged into Outlook. It's either Outlook itself or Word that dictates
whether or not it's mergerd as an attachment or in the body of the email.
Now, I haven't ever used Cactus before (I just got elected to fix this) so I
am not sure where I am to look yet. My first thought after getting this
info from Cactus is to look at how any 'merge' functionality in Word gets
configured and I don't see any kind of check box or radio button or whatever
where I can tell it to merge as an attachment or not. I don't see anything
in Outlook either. That's using Office 2003 by the way. But, that's the
question I am looking to have answered - where can I tell Word and/or
Outlook to merge the letters into the body of the email. I'll again try to
construct the test email and see what I get. It didn't work for me the
first time so I'll go through and work on it again. No, I am not a Word
expert either and have never used this function before - which is why I am
here to ask questions.

Again, thank you very much for responding to me -
Jon

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I don't see any kind of check box or radio button or whatever where I can

tell it to merge as an attachment or not. I don't see anything in Outlook
either.

OK, if you mailmerge starting from Word, when you select the Merge to Email
option, you get to specify
a. the column in the data source to use as the email address
b. the format (plain text, attachment, HTML)
c. the subject (which is just a pice of plain text)

If you experiment starting from Word 2003 (forgetting about Cactus for now)
I suggest that you enable the Mailmerge toolbar via Word View->Toolbars.
Then the first few buttons are concerned with the type of email you want to
do, the data source, and inserting various types of field. Towards the right
hand end of the toolbar, you should see optins for merging to email, file,
and printer.

(FWIW one of the great things about testing email stuff is that you can
always email yourself).

Have a look at that for now and if that's all straightforward, maybe we an
look at the issue of how to get the cactus stuff to do what you need.
Otherwise maybe you can try to say where you get stuck.

 

[Jon]

Peter,

I did get Mail Merge to successfully send me an email with the Word
document embedded in the body of the email rather than as an attachment. I
will have to go take another look at how things are set up on the systems
that use the Cactus program (there are 7 and they all send these letters and
they all are sending them as attachments now) and see if I can find the
setting for them to send them embedded rather than attached. Thank you very
much for looking into this with me since I haven't ever used this kind of
function in Word. Hopefully, I will be able to figure out what the deal is
and have them sending them correctly again.

Again, thank you very much - it really is appreciated,
Jon

 

[Peter Jamieson]

OK, I would guess that the merge to email settings are defined in the Word
document - otherwise, at least two of them would have to be set by whatever
opens the Word documents (i.e. the column to use as the source of the e-mail
addresses, and the fixed subject line. If Cactus sets those I would be quite
surprised if it does not also set the format, but perhaps it does not,
relies on the default, and the default has changed (I don't think it has -
I'm just speculating)