VSys One: Volunteer Management Software

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 you'd print and mail in an envelope, just sent electronically. See the section 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). 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. The letter template you use should have its method set to Any mail or E-mail, allowing the letter to be e-mailed. Do a mail merge and save the letters without printing.
2. Open the E-mail Robot.
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. 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 organizational e-mail address are sometimes handled differently than those sent outside of your local network.