Emailing the masses with mailing lists
By Emmanuel Narokobi - 21st April 2006

It's amazing how as busy as we are, most of us are guilty of taking part in sending jokes around to our friends or at most times sending jokes to people we only know by email address. Obviously there are also socially useful purposes like sporting clubs and associations. And of course the most useful purpose of all, Work!!!

One thing I find though is that sometimes not everybody wants their email addresses to be seen on your 'cc' list. So I've had to remind myself to use the 'bcc' as well. And I also find that it becomes a pain when I have to continuously email about 30 - 40 people regularly within a year (for rugby stuff). Some of you out there might know this already but a couple of weeks ago I discovered the distribution lists function on Outlook.

Finally, now I can email all my regulars without having to painstakingly look for each of the 30 persons email addresses. For those of you who don't know about the distribution list on Microsoft Outlook have a look at this useful webpage, http://ict.cas.psu.edu/training/howto/outlook/DistributionList.htm

On the other hand If you're in say the hospitality industry etc, (like our favourite place, LAMANA) and you want some more power and functionality in your mailng lists there is a fairly cheap software called WorldMerge that can help. It's major functions are:

  • Automate e-mailing - up to 8,000 messages an hour.
  • Protect your contact list - your list of recipients will not appear in the cc: box.
  • Personalize your message content with information from your source file. No more "Dear Valued Customer" messages!
  • Send targeted mailing to a partial list of your contacts using the WorldMerge filtering tool or manual selection.
  • WorldMerge Project Wizard guides you through the process quickly.
  • Save and reuse messages and mailing projects.
  • Use your existing database or source file - WorldMerge supports many file types; chances are your existing mailing list's file format is supported.
  • Save money - while maintaining direct control of your mailings. This program provides comparable services to a list server, but you won't have to pay someone to manage it for you, nor maintain a dedicated Internet connection.
  • Advanced features - send messages in text or HTML format with multi-part mime, send attachments, add your signature, and more!

You'll need a credit card to pay but it's a pretty good software for it's price and it has a FREE version.

And once again No, we are NOT masalai-i-tokaut...in case some of you are wondering...

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