Maxprog has created the ultimate tool for all of your e-mail marketing needs. MaxBulk Mailer allows you to design and send professional looking e-mails to your customers and prospects for as little as fractions of a penny...directly from your own desktop. Now your promotional messages will jump off the screen with HTML mail! MaxBulk Mailer HTML allows you to include graphics, fonts and colors turning your messages into professional online brochures. You can utilize your full lists of contact information with MaxBulk Mailer. You'll be able to reach everyone in your database without worrying about integration or compatibility issues. With MaxBulk Mailer you will create, manage and send your own powerful, personalized marketing message to your customers and potential customers.
Let us show you how! This document features comprehensive, step-by-step instructions regarding how to create your first mailing step by step.
Table of Contents
1.- Getting Started
2.- Composing your message
3.- Recipients
4.- Settings
5.- Preview
6.- Delivery
7.- Using Tags for custom mails
8.- Formatting text
9.- Conditional messages
10.- Scheduling Mail delivery
11.- Renaming optional tags
12.- Hyperlink Manager
13.- Setting global preferences
14.- Troubleshooting
15.- Legal Disclaimer
1.- Getting Started
Maxbulk Mailer mail document windows are split into five parts by tab panels labeled: Message, Recipients, Settings, Preview and Delivery. When creating your mail documents you will likely go thru them in this order. First you create a message and add attachments as needed, then you create or import your recipients list, you set up your mail account and you preview your document to make sure it will show up properly to recipients. Then you are ready to send a test mail to yourself switching to Test Mode (use 'Test Mode' checkbox located at the top of the log panel) and then send out your mail to your recipients. Use the Log panel to find out how your mail server is behaving. Once delivery is done you will receive a report by mail.
2.- Composing your Message
Launch MaxBulk Mailer - When you first launch MaxBulk Mailer, you are up in the Message screen, which you can commence typing your message, just like a normal e-mail client.
Type the subject - You have a Subject field where you can place a brief summary of what your message is about. It is recommended that you keep the Subject to 40 characters or less. MaxBulk Mailer also supplies a number of predefined prefixes ( 'News', 'Announce', 'Information' and 'Press Release') that you can insert to your subject to help your recipients identify the type message you are sending. You can create new ones and store them for later use.
Write your message - You can drop text files or text from any other text editor to the message field as well. If you want to you can also spice up your messages by sending it as styled text or using HTML code, with styles like Bold, Underline, larger font size, or a different font colour. Note that styled and HTML increase the size of the actual e-mail and not every one will be able to read them.
Set mail priority if needed (Optional) - Priority doesn't make your mail reach the recipient faster but only produces some effects on recipient side: subject will show itself with a different color for example.
Add attachments (Optional) - Maxbulk Mailer also supports the inclusion of attachments or enclosures, so you can add a Microsoft Word, Acrobat PDF or any type of document to your mail out.
Just press the disclosure triangle to show the attachment list up and drop your files to it or use the 'Add' button. Once done choose the encoding. Default Base64 encoding is fine for all kind of documents and MacBinary, BinHex, AppleSingle and AppleDouble for Apple specific files like applications that may contain a resource fork. You can use UUEncode instead of Base64 for documents but be aware that Claris Emailer will not decompress them properly.
Note : MacBinary, BinHex and AppleSingle encode your files grouping Resource fork and Data fork into a single binary file which is converted back to its original state once delivered. This is handy when sending applications or pictures with a built-in preview. Furthermore AppleDouble encode your file into two separated files, one for the Resource fork and other for the Data fork so if you send for example a picture with a custom preview icon and a built-in preview stored as resources inside the resource fork, if the target recipient has a Mac, he will get the full document when a PC user will get the picture itself only. AppleDouble is the best way to send documents that contain a resource fork and standard data in the data fork and recipients can be both Macs and PCs.
Ask for a Return Receipt (Optional) - Some mail readers include an option that forces recipients to send a receipt back to sender when opening incoming mails. It works properly with Netscape mail client for example and likely will be implemented in most mail readers in a near future. Use this feature carefully when sending mass mailings to avoid being flooded by thousands receipts!
Set the right Mail Format - Depending on the type of mail you are about to send you should select the format that best suits your needs from "Plain Text", "Text/HTML", "HTML only" and "Styled Text".
Select Plain text for plain text mails only.
Select Text/HTML for a combination of a plain text version and an HTML version of your mail.
Select HTML only for an HTML version only of your mail. No plain text version.
Select Styled Text if you want to use styles like Bold, Italic, Underline, Color, Font, Size, Bullet lists...
When writing "Plain Text" mails be careful to make lines shorter than 72 characters long to avoid unexpected results in the recipient side. Use Preview tab to check this!
When writing "Text/HTML" mails choose HTML and just drag and drop your HTML document below text version. Then Preview shows your text document in a window and you can check the HTML version with Internet Explorer or Netscape. Your document should be formatted this way:
Text version
.../...
<HTML>
html version
</HTML>
When writing "HTML only" mails just drag and drop your HTML code to MaxBulk message field. Then Preview lets you check your document with Internet Explorer or Netscape. Your document should be formatted this way:
<HTML>
html version
</HTML>
It's strongly recommended to use the "Text/HTML" format including a Text version of your mail when sending HTML as many mail clients like Claris Emailer do not support HTML. If this text version is not present, and "Text/HTML" format is selected, the text version will be created on the fly using the HTML version, however this can causes sometimes poor results. HTML documents can be made with whatever software available. Also MS Excel is able to save sheets as HTML. HTML documents are always saved as text. You can also drop HTML to MaxBulk Mailer directly. <HTML> and </HTML> tags are always included in HTML documents.
You will find examples of "Text/HTML" mails inside MaxBulk Mailer examples Folder.
Using "Styled Text" is very easy. Just use Bold, Italic, Underline buttons or Color, Font, Size, format popup menus. When sending a "Styled Text" mail, MaxBulk Mailer converts all the text into HTMLcode and also create a text version on the fly automatically. That way, all recipients will be able to read your mail even though they use a text only mail reader. (This feature is available only with the Pro version).
3.- Recipients
The next tab on the MaxBulk Mailer is the Recipients section and obviously this is the area when you add the recipients you wish to send a personalised e-mail. You can either manually enter the data straight in to Maxbulk Mailer, or more than likely, you'll import it from another database application like FileMaker Pro.
The records initially show the Firstname, Surname and E-mail fields, as well as indicating if the recipient is to be included in the mailout or not. If you click on the triangle, it will display any other fields you may have defined like Company or the Optional Fields.
To enter data yourself, you simply enter the details in the box at the base of the screen and click the Add button (or just press Enter on the keyboard).
To import data from another database application, you need to export it to common database format like Tab-delimited or Comma-Delimited text. Once you have the data in a format MaxBulk Mailer can handle, you simply click on the Import button, select the data file from the dialog and select Open. You'll then be presented with a screen showing all the fields included in the data file. You can use the Field Delimiter pop-up menu to choose the right format and to preview the actual data you can use the left and right arrows in the top left corner to scroll through each record.
Maxbulk assists you during the importation process giving you the possibility to import data from file to MaxBulk the way you want, that is, the fields you really need in the order you want using one of the four available delimiters: tab, comma, colon or semicolon. Your database field order likely won't correspond with the field order required by Maxbulk Mailer. Just highlight a field and use the up and down arrows on the right hand side of the screen until it matches the correct field and repeat as often as required. You can go thru file data in order to check that each field is really where expected. Once all the fields are aligned and properly checked, click the Import button and your data will be imported .
Note: Be aware that e-mail field must contain an mail address that is, if no mail detected, no entry will be added. MaxBulk Mailer lets you save your current import settings for later use. Just use the 'Import Presets' popup to create, load or remove your import settings.
If you choose to drop files directly over Maxbulk recipient list, make sure they are Tab delimited with recipient first name first, then surname, company, e-mail and all optional fields (Pro version only):
Anyway, a powerful mail parser will be activated if you need to import miscellaneous text.
Note: You can also import recipients from the clipboard. Just copy your text and then select Paste Special from the Edit menu.
Then you can add, edit or remove entries and export them. You can also drop address files or text to the list. MaxBulk Mailer takes care of wrong and duplicates entries for you. (Duplicate checking can be deactivated from the preferences).
You can use the "Lists" folder to store all your mailing lists, then you will be able to access them from the list popup menu and save changes pushing "Save" button. (However, this way, no duplicates checking will be performed)
In order to get control to each recipient, MaxBulk Mailer let you enable or disable each entry individually. By default all entries are activated. Uncheck each entry you don't want to send your mail to or activate/deactivate all entries with the 'All' check box.
Batch processes:
Ñ To remove many addresses from a list at once create a plain text file with name 'DELETE', add all the addresses to remove, save and drop it onto the list to process inside MaxBulk Mailer.
Ñ To keep addresses from a list create a plain text file with name 'KEEP', add all the addresses to keep, save and drop it onto the list to process inside MaxBulk Mailer. All other e-mails will be removed.
Note that MaxBulk Mailer Pro users:
- Styled text format support! - Bold, Italic, Underline, Color, Font, Size, Bullet lists...
- Conditional message contents depending on optional tags value.
- 20 Custom Tags for advanced mail merge.
- Ability to process tags in subject.
- 13 date tags, Long Date, Short Date, Abbreviated Date, Long Time, Short Time...
- Quick selector in order to check/uncheck recipients depending on their fields' values.
- Recipients' creation directly from Filemaker.
- Hyperlink manager. Allows you to insert text and HTML hyperlinks tags with one click.
- Full Applescript support.
- Full mySQL database support.
- Secure SSL connection support.
4.- Settings
The third tab, Settings, is actually the section you'll probably want to use first and is where you enable many of the sending options. Fill in the different fields as required by your SMTP server. Look below for a detailed description of each field. You can use your Internet config data selecting 'Internet config' entry from the list (Mac OS 8.x/9.x only).
Account ID: The ID you use in order to connect to your SMTP server.
SMTP host: Your SMTP host address and port (if different from default). Something like: smtp.domain.tld:port
SSL: Pro version lets you establish SSL v2, SSL v2/3, SSL v3 and TLS v1 secure connections.
From: Your e-mail address in the form myname@domain.tld
Name: The name that will appear in the From header.
Reply-To: Optional header you can set if you want replies to go to a different e-mail address.
Signature: Your signature. It will be appended to the end of your mail. (Plain text format only)
Select the Authentication scheme whether it is required by your server from the Authentication pull-down menu, possible choices are None, POP, ESMTP and APOP.
POP and APOP Authentication:
POP Server: The POP server address and port (if different from default) associated to your SMTP account.
Account ID: Your account ID. Use to be the same as ESMTP server account ID.
Password: The password to access this POP account.
SSL: Pro version lets you establish SSL v2, SSL v2/3, SSL v3 and TLS v1 secure connections.
ESMTP Authentication:
Account ID: Your account ID. Use to be the same as ESMTP server account ID.
Password: The password to access this ESMTP account.
Authentication type: From Login (Default), Plain, MD5 Challenge-Response
The Account ID needs to be a valid account that the SMTP (outbound e-mail) server recognizes and the SMTP needs to be accessible from your ISP and in fact is normally your ISP's STMP server you use in your normal e-mail client. The From field also needs to be a valid e-mail address that the SMTP server can process mail for. These requirements are standard with most SMTP servers to prevent spamming.
Port is an optional SMTP host and POP server parameters you just need to submit in the case you are not using SMTP default port 25 or POP default port 110.
The Authentication option is sometimes required by ISP's before you can access their SMTP servers and some anti-spam applications and filters also look for an Authentication header to determine that it is a legitimate e-mail.
Connections: MaxBulk Mailer lets you open several simultaneous connections to your SMTP server. With a fast internet connection this can speed up mail delivery quite significantly, but with a modem connection, you should keep it to one or two connections. You should also double-check your agreement with your ISP as to how many SMTP connections you can have at once. Note that using 20 connections is not necessarily faster than with 5 connections because of your system resources and your connection speed.
Group Mails: ISP's sometimes also limit the number of e-mail addresses that can be sent in any one connection or session with the SMTP server, so you can use the Group Mails option to specify how many messages to send on each connection and set an Interval between each batch. The higher the number, the faster it can be, but the more likely you're ISP will see your mail as possible spam. Sent mails are marked so if an error occurs or you cancel the process you can resume where you stopped. A new connection is made for each group delivery including a POP or ESMTP authentication if activated.
Bulk Preferences: If you don't use the personalization options of MaxBulk Mailer, you are missing out on one of its' most powerful features. However, you can speed up processing and sending of messages that aren't personalized by un-selecting the Activate tags processing option. If checked mails are sent one by one, showing recipient "To:" header. This allows mail merge tags to be replaced by their corresponding values depending on each entry. If not checked, mails are sent to all recipients at once. Note: the list is never sent to the recipient. Default 'To' header: is set to 'Undisclosed-Recipients' by default when sending bulk mails to avoid forwarding scripts to insert a 'To' header on the fly showing recipient list. This 'To' header can be overwritten with whatever you need. It is highly recommended to use small groups than 'All at once' to avoid 'Insufficient storage' SMTP errors.
Signature: The signature works like any e-mail client signature - it places a piece of standard text at the footer of each e-mail. We recommend you consider using it to indicate how people can unsubscribe from future e-mail... and then ensure you remove them from your list. It is also worth considering reminding people of why they are on your list and/or how they subscribed to it, particularly if you only use it once a month or less. Note that signature will only apply to Plain Text format.
Using the pop-up menu "Save new account as..." at the top of the screen, you can also save your settings for later retrieval as well as having different settings for things like the From fields for use with different departments. e.g. personalized you can have different From, Name, and Signatures for the sales and accounts departments.
While you are configuring your settings, you might set your global preferences as well. These can be accessed from the "Application" menu on Mac OS X or from the "Edit" menu on Mac OS 8/9. Alternatively, you can click on the little "preference" icon in the top left most corner of the settings screen. You can set a default account that will be selected automatically on new documents.
5.- Preview
The third tab on the main MaxBulk Mailer screen allows you to preview what your message will look like once the personalised data has been merged into the document and the Signature added. You can also make sure headers and contents match all previous introduced data. You check each individual record by using the left and right arrows in the top left of the screen.
The thin grey line running down the screen is called a "Philips Bar" and shows where the 72nd column is located. This has historical reasons dating back to days when all e-mail was plain text and expected to fit on a 80 column by 24 (or 25) line screen. To make e-mail that had been forwarded easy to read when the quoting character, usually a <, was added to each line, it was customary to limit the length of each line to 72 characters to allow for this. Today, some e-mail clients still expect this, and not everyone uses a Graphic User Interface, so to be 100% compatible, it often recommended that you still conform to this standard.
If your mail has an HTML part, use the preview popup to select a browser from the list.(Internet Explorer and Netscape).
6.- Delivery
Press the Send button, MaxBulk Mailer will now commence sending your messages and it displays a log of what it is doing while sending and depending on how you configured your settings, it will send one at a time or a batch of them together. Either way, you'll get to see it communicate with your SMTP server and the responses it gets back.
If you are in "Test Mode', MaxBulk will send a mail to yourself only. In order to switch to 'Test Mode' use the 'Test Mode' checkbox located on the Delivery panel top edge. Once you received this test mail and if all is as expected, you can deactivate 'Test Mode' and push send button again to have your mail delivered to all your recipients. Depending if you check "Custom recipient" or not, MaxBulk Mailer will send the mail once to all list members, grouped or one mail per entry in list.
Note: When sending with "All at once" method, the mail is not sent until the entire recipients list has been sent to the server so if you cancel the process you can be sure than no mails has been sent yet. However, if you use custom or grouped method, MaxBulk Mailer take care of keeping track of sent mails for you so if you resume the process, no duplicate mail will be generated.
You can however set manually the start e-mail in your list. Use 'Mail' -> "Partial Sending" menu and type the e-mail address from which you want MaxBulk to start. All recipients prior to this e-mail address will be marked as sent.
Once MaxBulk Mailer has finished sending your message, it will update the recipients list to show you which ones where sent and which it received errors on while sending. Sent mails can be distinguished easily, looking at their icons. A user icon means mail has not been sent yet when an envelope icon means mail has been already sent. A Stop icon however means that an error occurs when processing this recipient likely due to a syntax error. This information is saved with mail data so you can resume sending process very easily.
If you enabled it in your Preferences, you'll also receive a delivery report summary back via e-mail, showing you how many messages you sent, how many were successful and how many failed. The failures are based on those that the SMTP rejected immediately, often because the recipient's domain name didn't exist. It doesn't include bounces - those where the user didn't exist or had a full mail box. You'll get this back as separate e-mail over the period of a few days.
7.- Using Tags for custom mails
The feature that sets MaxBulk Mailer above a normal e-mail client like Eudora or Outlook Express, for e-mail marketing purposes is its personalisation options. You can use the special tags [Fullname], [Firstname], [Surname] and [Company] in order to customize each mail with recipients data. Or using any of the 14 Date tags available in order to insert the current date. These personalisation options are accessed through the Tags menu:
Ex:
Hi [Firstname] [Surname],
Chicago, [Short Date] we are proud to announce...
When mailed to John the 12/10/2000, will be converted to:
Hi John Donovan,
Chicago, 12/10/2000 we are proud to announce...
Note: MaxBulk Mailer Pro adds 10 optional custom Tags for mail-merge which can be used at your own convenience in order to send specific data imported from you database to the new 10 columns of address list to your recipients, very handy for software developers who need to send serials, schools who need to send scores to their alumni and so on... Read 'About Maxbulk' document to find out how to register or upgrade to Pro version. MaxBulk Mailer Pro also allows the use of tags in subject.
8.- Formatting text (Only for "Plain Text" format)
You can use the "Edit menu -> Rewrap Text" in order to set selected text lines to 72 characters long standard , or the "Edit menu -> Justify Text" to justify selected text to 72 characters and get a best appearance.
9.- Conditional messages
MaxBulk Mailer allows the use of conditional statements depending on tags values. This is particularly handy for example when you need to customize your mails depending on each recipient gender. To insert a conditional statement, use the button just on the right of the tag popup menu.
Choose the tag you want to use for your condition between all available tags on the popup list then the condition and the value of the condition. Available conditions are : (between[] is the used symbol)
- [*] contains
- [!*] doesn't contains
- [=] is equal to
- [<>] is not equal to
- [#?] start with
- [?#] end with
- [>] is upper than
- [<] is less than
- [>=] is upper or equal to
- [<=] is less or equal to
On the text field, put the text you want to be used when the condition is matched.
An example of a conditional statement, to customize your mails depending on recipients' gender will be:
----
<if [[Gender]] = "M">
Dear Mr. [Surname]
</if>
<if [[Gender]] = "F">
Dear Mrs. [Surname]
</if>
We would like to present our new fitness product...
----
For this example we have renamed an optional field to 'Gender'. In 'Gender' column we use letter 'M' or 'F' for male and
Female. Then with two conditional statements MaxBulk will select between: 'Dear Mr. [Surname]' and 'Dear Mrs. [Surname]' depending on each recipient gender. Of course you can write manually all those statements, just follow the format:
Start with <if and end with </if>. Put tag between another [], then use a symbol between *, !*, =, <>, #?, ?#, >, <, >= and <= (according to table above), put your value between double quotes and end with >. And of course write the text to be used if the condition is matched.
10.- Scheduling Mail delivery
MaxBulk includes a mail scheduling system in order to program mail deliveries. It is very simple to use. Once your mail 's composed, select 'Schedule' menu and enter the day, month, year and hour at which you want your mail to be sent.
Scheduling can be useful if you want to have the e-mail go out during a quite time for your network, like at 2am, so it doesn't impact on your other internet tasks like web browsing and e-mail, but your machine will need to be on, running Maxbulk Mailer and connected to the internet at the scheduled time in order for this to work. When you click Send (or OK from the Scheduler) you'll probably get a dialogue box warning you that your text is greater than 72 characters wide and to re-warp your text - this is due to the Philips Bar discussed above. Just click Send Anyway.
11.- Renaming optional tags
If you need to rename optional tags for the whole application use the 'Preferences...'menu. But if you want to rename tags for only your current document, use 'Rename tags...' menu.
12.- Hyperlink Manager
MaxBulk Mailer includes a very simple way to store all your hyperlinks, the Hyperlink Manager. Using this feature you can insert hyperlink tags inside your message using the Edit -> 'Insert Hyperlink' menu. Hyperlinks tags are surrounded with double brackets this way: <<hyperlink>>
During delivery, hyperlink tags are processed and replaced by proper values depending message format. When with 'Plain Text' the hyperlink tag is simply replaced, with Styled Text a rich HTML hyperlink is created using assigned tag name as the clickable text hiding completely the HTML link URL.
13.- Setting global preferences
The first tab of the preferences is Encoding and this determines the way your e-mail looks when editing and the language encoding used when sending. Change it if needed. By default type is set to "Monaco" and encoding to "ISO-8859-1" right for Europe/USA/Africa. You can choose from following encodings:
- ISO-8859-1 Europe/America/Africa
- ISO-8859-2 Eastern Europe
- ISO-8859-3 SE Europe/miscellaneous
- ISO-8859-4 Scandinavia/Baltic
- ISO-8859-5 Cyrillic
- ISO-8859-6 Arabic
- ISO-8859-7 Greek
- ISO-8859-8 Hebrew
- ISO-8859-9 Turkish
- ISO-8859-10 Lappish/Nordic/Eskimo
- ISO-8859-13 Baltic
- ISO-8859-14 Celtic
- ISO-2022-JP Japanese
- ISO-2022-CN Chinese
- ISO-2022-KR Korean
- GB2312 - EUC-CN Chinese Simplified
- HZ-GB-2312 - HZ Chinese
- X-EUC-TW - Chinese Taiwan
- Big5 - Chinese Traditional
- Shift-JIS Japanese
- US-ASCII Standard 7 bits ASCII
- UTF-8 Universal Alphabet (Unicode UTF8)
- UTF-16 Universal Alphabet (Unicode UTF16)
- Windows-1252 Windows Latin1
- Windows-1250 Windows Latin2
- Windows-1256 Windows Arabic
- Windows-1257 Windows Baltic
- Windows-1251 Windows Cyrillic
- Windows-1253 Windows Greek
- Windows-1255 Windows Hebrew
- Windows-1254 Windows Latin5
- Windows-1258 Window Vietnamese
The second tab is where you can elect to configure the names of the ten optional tags. By default they are called [Opt1] through [Opt10], but as you can see these aren't exactly the most descriptive names. So, just change them to something that will make more sense like [Address] or [Suburb]. Note these changes are global and will affect all future messages. However, they will appear as such in the Tags menu on the compose screen.
The next tab has a few miscellaneous preferences. In the recipients import section you can get MaxBulk to automatically change the case of each record imported so that the first letter of the Firstname and Surname are capital letters and the rest are lower case. By default this is on, but if you are importing from a known database set though, it is useful to turn it off as it can change what you have typed in your database. eg, it will change "Stuart McLaren" to "Stuart Mclaren". While this might not be important to you or me, but may be to Stuart, as his name is spelt with a capital L. One very useful feature is the check for duplicate entries. If enabled it will only import one single instance of an e-mail address - thus saving sending multiple copies of your e-mail to that person. You can also set if you want a Delivery Report sent back via e-mail and to which address it should be sent. You can also have MaxBulk Mailer save a copy of the connection log and the recipients list, so you can access them again next time you launch MaxBulk Mailer.
The last tab enables to add some X-Headers to your messages. X-Headers are optional fields that appear inside the e-mail header part, all that "jargon" at the beginning of an e-mail. Many people include an Organisation X-Header and sometimes in the Comments X-Headers information on how to un-subscribe can be included.
14.- Troubleshooting
If you are having troubles getting started or using MaxBulk Mailer, feel free to ask us using our support inquiry form located at http://inquiry.maxprog.com/. Please be as descriptive as possible.
15.- Legal Disclaimer
BY USING THIS DOCUMENT, YOU ARE AGREEING TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS PRESENTED BELOW:
Use the information contained in this document at your own risk. Under no circumstances, including negligence, shall Max Programming be liable for any incidental, special or consequential damages that result from the use of this document, even if advised of the possibility of such damages.
