OK, so that’s a really lame name for a program, but I named it so I wouldn’t forget what it was. I could have called it PhireFaacs, but really, do you think I would know what that was in two weeks? Forget for a moment how much ridicule I would receive from my peers for choosing such a stupid name — that’s an even dumber name than “Newsletter Sender”.
Anyway, I wrote a simple little WinForms program last night (screenshots below) to help me send out the newsletter for the WI .NET Users Group. (See how I decided on the name???) In a nutshell it does a mail merge of some comma delimeted text datasource against an e-mail template. “So what?”, you ask. Yeah, I asked that, too, but it does make my newsletter sending a little easier.
Basic instructions (because there is no help file or tooltips):
- Specify an SMTP mail server, and optional SMTP username and password.
- Load a data file. This can be any CSV formatted file, but there must be row headers.
- Specify which field in the data file contains e-mail addresses.
- Enter the “from” address.
- Enter the message subject.
- Enter the message body.
- Specify a priority.
- Click “Send”
The SMTP mail server, SMTP username, and from address can be stored in an XML file that gets created the first time you run the program (you have to edit it manually). The subject and body can contain placeholders ({0}, {1}, etc.) that will be replaced with data from that column (note that this is zero-based index).
That’s basically it.
The ZIP download is available here. Blah blah blah your own risk blah blah blah I’m not responsible blah blah blah.
Screenshots (also included in ZIP download)
The UI:
A Merged E-mail:
http://
Inspiring, your quick too. 🙂
Auren Hoffman
scott — this is cool. i actually just you MS Word’s mail merge. instead of pointing the merge to a printer, i just point it to email (via outlook). works great.
Scott
Auren – Yeah, but if I did that then I wouldn’t have anything to blog about. 🙂
Maybe I’ll try that next time.