E-mail Robot

The E-mail Robot consists of a pair of tools for sending bulk letters via e-mail. These are the same letters as you'd print and mail in an envelope, just sent electronically. See the sections SMTP vs. MAPI to decide which one of these tools to use.

Open the E-mail Robot by clicking on E-mail letter robot (SMTP) or E-mail letter robot (MAPI) from the Letters panel on the main VSys screen. The screen which comes up is nearly identical to the Letter Manager with a few extensions: the Setup e-mail options link and the Send selected letters button.

Steps in this task

1. Do a mail merge and save the letters without printing. The letter template you use should have its method set to "All", allowing the letter to be e-mailed.
2. Open the E-mail Robot from the E-mail and SMS/Text Messaging panel.
3. Set the selection criteria to the appropriate values to select the letters you want to send.
4. Click on the Get letters button. Only letters which meet your criteria, are associated with people who have a valid e-mail address, and are not associated with people marked as "Do not e-mail" will show on-screen.
5. Click the Send selected letters button. VSys will send each letter one at a time, marking each as "Sent" and setting its Mailed date to the current date as it's finished.

At any point during the sending process you can cancel the operation and VSys will stop. But those letters already sent at this point are already gone, and cannot be cancelled.

The first few e-mails you send should be to yourself or to some sample addresses to ensure that the process worked as expected. Consider setting up one or more Gmail, Hotmail or other web-based e-mail accounts for this purpose, as e-mails to your in-house e-mail address are sometimes handled differently than those sent outside of your local network.