Email Attachments

[dmsjps]

The company I work for regularly mass emails its clients (not spamming, they're all registered as clients who wish to receive information from us) regarding forthcoming products, etc. I'm the one who ends up doing this, which is fine, no problem, because I just use the mail merge facility in Word. But is there a way I can send an email with my message in the actual email and send an attachment (say a flyer) with it as well instead of having to put a link to the relevant page on the website in the email?

 

I know I can do this using Outlook Express, but then I can't send the emails so that they look as though I've typed the email especially for that person and no one else has a copy, unless I do them one by one. When I have 2000 to send, this could obviously take for ever. I know I can send it to one person and blind copies to everyone else, but it's still not an email to Bob Jones with 'Dear Mr Jones' at the beginning.

 

Using Word's mail merge feature means I can send 2000 emails in one go, each one addressed to the person with 'Dear Mr Jones' (or whoever) at the beginning, but I can't work out how to add an attachment as well. It gives me the option to send my message as an attachment, but then it sends a blank email.

 

Does this mean there is a special piece of software around that we have to buy in order to do the mailing as we wish, or am I - and it's quite feasible, I know - just missing something out?

 

Any suggestions would be very gratefully received - and will earn me a brownie point or two with the boss!

[Hippy]

I am gld to see that you are doing the job properly with the mail merge rather than the CC or blind CC with a humungous list idea. The disadvantage of which is that if one recipient does not exist and that email server is incorrectly set then you get literally thousands of bounces going around the net for months!

What you are doing by giving your clients an URL in the mail is to be praised, as the banwidth implications of sending 2,000+ HTML attachments should be obvious. The recipients have the opportunity of looking at the news or whateverr it is over the Net in a more efficient manner than your ecoding it, sending it as a bloated attachment and their decoding it at the other end whether they want it or not!

Get your Brownie points for explaining how you are saving the global electricity bill by doing it the way you are.

A lot (and I mean loads) of people in business have their email clients set to ignore HTML only emails and the HTML content of emails, delivering just the plain text, so your fancy formatting will be lost on a good proportion of your audience. You will seem "responsible" if you keep your mails short and to the point without fancy HTML stuff but including links to the eye candy.

[dmsjps]

Hi Hippy, never thought of that and of course it's very true. They're always asking me why I can't do it though, so I just wanted to know if there is actually a way.

 

Having said that, taking into account what you've explained, I would much prefer to keep sending the emails the way I do now myself.

 

Thank you.