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How automate individual emails, to 160 schools? 1

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bcindc

Programmer
Jan 12, 2002
24
US
I need to send weekly student lists. Have stumbled around VB 6, C++Builder 5, Delphi, Paradox 10, Access and Outlook- to no avail. There must be a simple way to send a single page unique to each of our schools, without 700 lines of VB Script. Any ideas? Help!!
 
Take a look at OL help and search for "Mail Merge".

The first article to read is:

About using contacts for a mail merge.

If you could describe the contents of your one page document a little and what is different for each recipient I may be able to help.

Also which version of OL are you using? I am on OL2002(aka XP) Post back with success or failure resolving issue(s).
If you found this helpful let us know by voting below.
 
rjkrash
I build a one page list of all the students-needing-transportation to each of 166 schools, each day. The 166 lists are in text format and is produced in Paradox (or could be from Access, or whatever). I would like to email each schools' unigue list to each of the schools.
Thanx,
bcindc
 
Wow, Long time between posts.. Must be starting the new school year soon and have to get this little issue resolved :)

I note from your profile "Programmer since 1973" so I won't bore you with the details of how but...

I'd use Access and explicitly I use the SendObject action in a macro. I would then call the macro from a VB script or program that I ran each day to output what are called SnapShot reports in Access. The value of the "To" argument of the SendObject action would of course come from the database as it would be stored along with the name of the school.

I know for a fact that this could be done in a lot less than "700 lines" of code. The SendObject call is just one line. The only "programming" would really come from how you implement the running of the query each day for each of the 166 schools. If it is written in VB (my choice) then run the macro from a procedure using the RunMacro method of the DoCmd object as a part of the DoLoop which runs a report for each school. ----
"eXPerience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards." - annon
 
There is a pretty simple way using Eudora 'Automation'

If you create a nam.MSG file with

-------------------

To: contact@school.edu
Subject: Transportation list for mm/d/yy
From: you
(blank line)
body...


------------------------

and start Eudora (any Eudora client even the Lites, after 3.0) with the command line

..\eudora.exe nam.msg

It shoves the output into the outbox.

--
nam.msg is [d:][\path\]filename.ext and

contact@school.edu is the email address of person to receive, or list of email addresses.
--


Look for Eudora Automation on the Qualcom site.

A simple batch file could arrange this, e.g export the text to a folder, prepend the appropriate header, even a COPY command could to that, then send the files into eudora.

Or as you are already using a variety of languages, not very many VB or Delphi lines could extract the message, put the header on and spawn the eudora add, one per message to send.

It takes Eudora about a second to absorb each message, so for less that two hundred count on three minutes, and similarly for Eudora to send, depending on connect speed, cpu......

Working in ASCII is so easy to debug it should not be an arduous task. The first test can be done with NotePad as a compiler :).

J


 
You can download my free VB6 program at (click on the Downloads button) to accomplish this. It interfaces well with Outlook 2000 and Outlook 98.

It will not work with Outlook Express.

Because of Outlook 2002's security issues, the first 3 to 5 email addresses get ignored. You'll get prompted to allow this program to access Outlook 2002 -- then when replying yes, it continues, thus missing the first couple of addresses. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to discover a work around for this.

Jim Null [pc2]
Web:
 
"Because of Outlook 2002's security issues, the first 3 to 5 email addresses get ignored. You'll get prompted to allow this program to access Outlook 2002 -- then when replying yes, it continues, thus missing the first couple of addresses. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to discover a work around for this."

At last I can contribute something instead of only asking!

I found "PTFB" (Press the Freakin' Button) at and use it to respond to the security message.

I've found that closing Outlook prior to running and letting PTFB reply to the Outlook as email program message also avoids issues regarding inbound messages, etc.

Hope this helps someone!
LJ
 
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