Mail merge that includes attachments, HTML, customized subjectlines, and selectable 'From' accounts

[Ross Nowels]

I'm an educational consultant who sends e-mails to dozens, sometimes
hundreds, of prospects and/or clients at a time. When sending out
personalized messages, I have to do a lot of one-by-one tweaking and/or
attaching prior to deploying these messages.

What I'd like to be able to do in addition to pulling data from an Excel
spreadsheet is to attach PDFs, Word documents, and/or Excel documents to the
message in progress; include web page links and e-mail links that survive
the merge; and possibly customize the subject line before the merge.

It would also be nice to be able to designate the account from which I'm
sending the e-mail within the merge wizard, rather than have to change the
default account in Entourage prior to the merge.

Thank you for any help you can offer regarding these issues.

Cordially,

Ross

 

[Dayo Mitchell]

[cross-posted to Entourage, see below for first response]

I'm an educational consultant who sends e-mails to dozens, sometimes
hundreds, of prospects and/or clients at a time. When sending out
personalized messages, I have to do a lot of one-by-one tweaking and/or
attaching prior to deploying these messages.

What I'd like to be able to do in addition to pulling data from an Excel
spreadsheet is to attach PDFs, Word documents, and/or Excel documents to the
message in progress; include web page links and e-mail links that survive
the merge; and possibly customize the subject line before the merge.

It would also be nice to be able to designate the account from which I'm
sending the e-mail within the merge wizard, rather than have to change the
default account in Entourage prior to the merge.

Thank you for any help you can offer regarding these issues.

Cordially,

Ross

Hi Ross,

This sounds more like a question you might want to ask in the Entourage
newsgroup (so I cross-posted it there)....actually it sounds like a feature
request, I suggest you also use Send Feedback. But those do sound like nice
features...I could use those too...

Presumably you produce a personalized email from the merge process, and then
you want all the personalized emails to have certain files attached.
Leaving you with a number of personalized messages, and then you have to
change the subject line for every message and attach the same files to all
the messages, clearly very repetitive actions. And if you forgot to switch
the account in Entourage first, you have to do the merge all over again. Is
that a correct description of your workflow?

Rather than complicating the mailmerge wizard, you should be able to ease
the drudgery after the merge with scripts in Entourage.

For instance, there's this script:
Change Message Subject by Lisa Thompson
"This script will change the subject of the selected message(s) after
prompting the user to enter the new subject(s). It also adds a note at the
top of each message indicating that the subject has been changed. It
requires Microsoft Entourage. Version 1.01 updates the author's email
address."
Free from http://scriptbuilders.net (search on title), sounds like it might
help out.

I didn't find a script to add the same attachment to selected messages
(though I found all sorts of cool other stuff), but imagine one could be
written. It might already be, under the name MultiSend, wasn't quite sure
from the description. "MultiSend E is a batch emailer with advanced features
for Microsoft Entourage. With one click, it allows you to attach files and
send personalized plain text or complex HTML messages to thousands of
recipients. It is ideal for newsletters and mailing lists." This might
actually replace the merge process and do everything you asked for in
itself.

DM

 

[Jeffrey Weston [MSFT]]

Hello, Ross

I like your suggestion to be able to specify the email account before the
merge, and I'll pass that along, along with the rest of your post.

Hopefully you can get some sample scripts from the sites the MVP's mentioned
or from others on the Entourage newsgroup.

Thanks for the input!

Jeffrey Weston
Mac Word Test
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft

 

[Dayo Mitchell]

Well, I think being able to specify the subject line actually makes more
sense as an across-the-board feature that everyone using merge to email
would find useful, maybe put a flag on that request too? (unless it
already exists, I haven't taken advantage of merge to email yet)

Dayo