Applications to Support Newsletter Publishing

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Will - 24 Apr 2007 07:02 GMT

Normally when you send out a Newsletter, or email to a sensitive list like
suppliers or customers, you want the To: field of each recipient's email to
be customized with their name appearing as the only name. That requires
special support at your mail server, and I would like to know if Exchange
implements such a concept maybe as a special type of distribution list, or
if there are third party applications to support this.

Essentially to customize the distribution, you must custom-construct each
piece of outgoing mail with a different To: field construction and then send
it separately. That is opposed to the approach used by most mailers such
as Outlook Express that uses one value in the To: field for the name of the
list, and then SMTP ends up sending that same piece of email to each
recipient separately. That's the approach I see in 95% of all mailers and
mail servers, and it's not what I want at all.

What are my best options?

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Will

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Michael Bednarek - 24 Apr 2007 13:49 GMT

>Normally when you send out a Newsletter, or email to a sensitive list like
>suppliers or customers, you want the To: field of each recipient's email to
[quoted text clipped - 12 lines]
>
>What are my best options?

Mailmerge is a function of the client, not of the Exchange server.

AFAIK Mailmerge in Outlook requires Microsoft Word, or VBA code. Other
SMTP clients, including command line mailers, do it self contained.

A commonly used alternative with Outlook is to put the Distribution List
into the BCC: field. Note that some servers regard excessively long
distribution lists as a SPAM indicator.

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Michael Bednarek http://mbednarek.com/ "POST NO BILLS"

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Will - 25 Apr 2007 00:09 GMT

>>Normally when you send out a Newsletter, or email to a sensitive list like
>>suppliers or customers, you want the To: field of each recipient's email
[quoted text clipped - 25 lines]
> into the BCC: field. Note that some servers regard excessively long
> distribution lists as a SPAM indicator.

You are confusing the customization of content inside the *body* of the
email with customization of the To: field, which is part of the RFC822
header.

Customization of an RFC822 header is not a traditional mailmerge and is not
in the scope of what Microsoft Word can or should do. You are probably
right that the most straightforward implementation of that customization
would be in the mailer/client. It's just that with the level of
sophistication in Exchange now, you can imagine a server based
implementation, but I think it would require additional software that is
specially tailored to the application.

And, as you correctly point out, putting the list in the BCC field is not a
good solution because it guarantees that half of your recipients will file
away the email as spam.

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Will

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Michael Bednarek - 26 Apr 2007 05:13 GMT

>>>Normally when you send out a Newsletter, or email to a sensitive list like
>>>suppliers or customers, you want the To: field of each recipient's email to
>>>be customized with their name appearing as the only name. That requires
>>>special support at your mail server, and I would like to know if Exchange
>>>implements such a concept maybe as a special type of distribution list, or
>>>if there are third party applications to support this.

[snip]

>> Mailmerge is a function of the client, not of the Exchange server.
>>
>> AFAIK Mailmerge in Outlook requires Microsoft Word, or VBA code. Other
>> SMTP clients, including command line mailers, do it self contained.

[snip]

>You are confusing the customization of content inside the *body* of the
>email with customization of the To: field, which is part of the RFC822
>header.
>
>Customization of an RFC822 header is not a traditional mailmerge and is not
>in the scope of what Microsoft Word can or should do.

[snip]

I'm pretty sure that Microsoft Word/Outlook can send a single
uncustomized message/attachment, iow a newsletter, to many recipients by
generating a message for each. I'm similarly sure that this approach is
not the most effective or even convenient way of doing this. I would use
a command line mailer.

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Michael Bednarek http://mbednarek.com/ "POST NO BILLS"

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