Cory Posted November 24, 2009 Report Share Posted November 24, 2009 For a client I frequently send large batch emails using MEP but it does not support HTML and this is now a requirement. I have looked at several mailing applications but none I can find appear to support variable attachments like MEP. Any suggestions? I know I could write a macro to manually compose and send with Outlook but given the quantity and other issues I'd rather not. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul Posted November 24, 2009 Report Share Posted November 24, 2009 Have you looked at CDO, which you drive via AutoIt or VBScript? CDO Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cory Posted November 25, 2009 Author Report Share Posted November 25, 2009 Good suggestion. ................................................ I think you have actually suggested this before. It will take me a little time to learn but this page is an excellent tutorial. Eventually I could be advanced and run it from the database but if that’s too much for e to fathom I can always start with a simple 1 shot email script and repeat with MEP. Thanks a lot Paul! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul Posted November 25, 2009 Report Share Posted November 25, 2009 Eventually I could be advanced and run it from the database but if that's too much for e to fathom I can always start with a simple 1 shot email script and repeat with MEP. Thanks a lot Paul! Some caveats: - if you send lots of emails in one hit, you may be treated as a spammer - the server you use (if you use one) may be limited in the number of emails that can be sent in one hit - actually, I always divide the emails I want to send into smallish batches, varying from 10 to 49 (this latter figure was derived from the amount of space our server had available divided by the size of the email plus attachments we wanted to send at the time) - FYI, it's impossible to validate email addresses unless you send a trial email to each first. Here's why: if you ask my work's server whether mickey.mouse@server exists, it'll respond Yes! If you ask my ISP whether PThornett@westnet.com.au exists, it'll respond No. Both answers are lies!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cory Posted November 25, 2009 Author Report Share Posted November 25, 2009 Good warnings but I think I'll be OK. ..................................................... I will be sending these through the companies Exchange server so luckily I don't have issues with large batches. And since it's local it will queue them all up and send them out. But in the past I have done something I thought clever. I created a batch email macro any of the troops could use and even though none did it had a clever feature. It would get the message ready and calculate the message size. Then based on the available bandwidth and the fact that I didn't want to choke their T1 I would calculate a delay so that it would only ever use half on average. And the user could stop and restart it. Too bad no one used it besides me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul Posted November 25, 2009 Report Share Posted November 25, 2009 Good warnings but I think I'll be OK...................................................... I will be sending these through the companies Exchange server so luckily I don't have issues with large batches. And since it's local it will queue them all up and send them out. Ha ha! That's exactly what I thought in identical circumstances with our Exchange server. Little did I know. I had completely failed to take into account the utter incompetence and stupidity of our network guys (with whom I am forced to work every day). We've even written code to validate email addresses (one by one of course - who ever heard of set theory?) which runs exceedingly slowly, and of course doesn't return anything useful about the validity of a given email address (for reasons I provided earlier). And which we're all supposed to use! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cory Posted November 25, 2009 Author Report Share Posted November 25, 2009 Well luckily I am the Exchange guy. ............................................................ Actually I am the everything guy except the external website so if I need to make a change I can. We were sending out a mailer the other day and I was actually thinking of email address validation and a pre-test. I have a cool macro that test if an email address is correctly formatted but I was recalling how I used to test the SMTP server on Exchange using Telnet. I was thinking one could write a macro that would directly connect to their mail server and do the initial handshake to see if the recipient was OK. I know that it could still get bounced for other reasons like over zealous spam filters but at least stupid things like EEs no longer with the company could be identified and addressed by CSRs prior to the email batch. Are you suggesting this wouldn’t work? IE you might get a ‘bad’ on recipient when in fact it’s a valid email address? I could see why one might want to misreport as I’m sure spammers would use this for harvesting. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul Posted November 26, 2009 Report Share Posted November 26, 2009 I was thinking one could write a macro that would directly connect to their mail server and do the initial handshake to see if the recipient was OK. I know that it could still get bounced for other reasons like over zealous spam filters but at least stupid things like EEs no longer with the company could be identified and addressed by CSRs prior to the email batch. Are you suggesting this wouldn't work? IE you might get a 'bad' on recipient when in fact it's a valid email address? I could see why one might want to misreport as I'm sure spammers would use this for harvesting. Well, it seems from my 2 examples in an earlier message that companies can adopt one of two policies: - say everybody exists, e.g. Donald.Duck@webaddress - say nobody exists, e.g. Barack.Obama@whitehouse.gov Actually, to me, the first makes no sense, but our organization follows that path. Remember the earlier comments about stupidity and incompetence...? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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