Blind carbon copies in e-mail

[kyowell]

I am e-mailing using my FM database and Outlook. I have two problems:

 

1. I would like to have the recipient's name appear in the "To:" box in Outlook, rather than their e-mail address.

 

2. I would like to be able to send blind carbon copies in bulk e-mails. In other words, I would rather each recipient did not see the names or addresses of all of the other recipients.

 

Any thoughts?

[slstrother]

You will need to use a plug-in for BCC. I am not sure about your first question.

Look at www.fmplugins.com , there are several e-mail plug-ins.

[andygaunt]

Check out SMTPit by community networking (http://www.comm-unity.net)

 

Allows To (with their name instead of email address)

 

CC and BCC.

 

Attachments, sending text and/or HTML emails.

 

Even use inline text and html files (which means you simply point that email to use a text or html file) and that file becomes the body of your email.

 

I use this in a marketing solution for sending out mass emailshots.

 

HTH

[J Wenmeekers]

You can do it without a plug-in, with the good old developer way = construct the URL. (credit to Chuck)

 

Use the Open URL script step. Properly set up, this script step behaves like Send Mail, but it takes a bit more work to get it going. The reason is that you have to construct the URL. Most URLs that you're probably familiar with look like this:

http://www.filemaker.com

This is a URL for a web site. But URLs exist for email as well. Whenever you see a link for an email address on the web and when you click it you get a new message in your email program, you clicked an email URL. The simplest kind look like this:

mailto://name@pandora.be

This tells the computer what kind of URL it is (a mail URL) and the address for the URL (my email address). But a mail URL can have more than just an email address. It can have a subject, cc, body, etc. Here's a URL that includes the subject:

mailto://name@pandora.be?subject=FM Forums

So, if you have a field for the email address, a field for the subject, for the body, for the cc address and for the bcc address, you could create another field that has a calculation such as this:

"mailto://" & email_address & "?subject=" & subject & "?body=" & body & "?cc=" & cc & "?bcc=" bcc

You can make this more complex by checking whether there is anything in each of the fields before adding the tag for that field, like this:

"mailto://" & email_address & "?subject=" & subject & "?body=" & body & Case( not IsEmpty( cc ), "?cc=" & cc, "" ) & Case( not IsEmpty( bcc ), "?bcc=" bcc, "" )

Now if the cc or bcc fields are empty, those sections won't be included at all.

There's one more thing to know about this way of sending email. If you have paragraph returns in the body, or some other characters such as the ampersand (&), these may not show up properly, since such characters have to be encoded for the URL to work properly. I used to think that you had to know all of the codes, but a FM Guru recently pointed out to me that there is a function in FileMaker that will take care of this for you. It's an external function of the Web Companion plug-in called "Web-ToHTTP", and it will replace all of the characters that might not work correctly with their http equivelants. Spaces will be replaced by %20, returns by %0d, etc. This nice thing about this function is that you don't have to worry about which characters need to have replacement codes. It does all the work for you.

Here's the above calculation with this function in place:

"mailto://" & email_address & External( "Web-ToHTTP", ( "?subject=" & subject & "?body=" & body & Case( not IsEmpty( cc ), "?cc=" & cc, "" ) & Case( not IsEmpty( bcc ), "?bcc=" bcc, "" ) )

I don't place this around the "mailto://" & email_address portion of the calc because mailto:// doesn't need it, and the email_address, if it's a legal address, shouldn't need it either.

For the full details on this function, check out FileMaker's online help. For this function to work, the Web Companion plug-in needs to be turned on.