Mining info from outlook emails

[Mark Hill]

Hi all;

I have a unique problem.
I own a web site with a "contact us" page with the following fields :

Name:
Company:
Email:
Fax:
Country:
Address:
Comments:

My clients fill in the contact page and the data is sent to me via email.
As a result, I now have 2000 contact emails, all in a single folder inside
Outlook 2K3.

I'd like to be able to create HTML product announcements and automatically
send them off to all the people in this contact folder.

I imagine it's possible to mine the information from these messages and
populate an outgoing message (Word etc) that would subsequently be sent via
email to the appropriate recipient.

Any suggestions other than hand typing them all into an Access database ?


Mark Hill
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Judy Gleeson]

Try email merging Outlook contact details. Select the contacts you want to
mail (use the Phone List view and sort by the field you need e.g. Country)
The click Tools, Mailmerge. Add to the bottom of the screen, then select
merge to email. A subject field will appear at the bottom of the screen.
Put a subject in it. Once you've done this, click OK.

Word will start up automatically. Type Hi then select (firstname) from the
available merge fields. You'll need the mailmerge toolbar showing. Other
fields such as (company) can be added to your email letter. There's an ABC
icon in Word that shows your merged data on screen. There's an icon to merge
to email. Off it goes!

This is an easy way to merge to a bunch of people. We can send an email to
all Training Managers in our city, who have Outlook, but aren't clients.
Then we select a different bunch of people and send a different email. Just
make more Contacts fields to hold the data you need to store about people.

Mark, test it internally so you know how it works!

Regards

Judy Gleeson
Acorn Training and Consulting

 

[Mark Hill]

Thanks for your help Judy, but I think you may have misunderstood my
request.

The contact info I have is not located in my contacts folder, it's contained
in individual emails from thousands of people who have filled in my web
based "contact us" form. Once they've filled in the form, my web site
automatically sends me the email containing all their info.
As a result, I have a folder with >2000 emails, each containing fields of
data as noted below.
My goal is to mine the data from each of these emails to create a
centralized database that I can use for mail-merge applications.

FYI .... I also have Outlook 2K3 Business Contact Manager installed, in
addition to all the tools associated with Office Pro 2K3.

Thanks again for your help.

Mark Hill

 

[Graeme]

Hello Mark, outside the scope of this list but how is your webform set-up?

On the registration page on our website we send a mail with the form fields
(as per your example) but also save the details to a CSV file on the web
server. Every week we download the file and it is in a state ready for mail
merge.


Regards
Graeme
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[Mark Hill]

Thanks Graeme

I'll ask my server group.
Maybe (hopefully) they'll have a nice CSV file that I can import.
Wouldn't that be nice !!!

Mark