Basics of sending lots of email

If you're reading this, I'm assuming you or a group you're associated with needs to send emails, probably a significant amount of email.

You need a server that will send your mail

Our recommendation is that you use Mailgun. You can send up to 300 emails per day for free. You'll have better reporting about who is opening your emails.

You will need data that has email, and other data that might personalize the mailing

You have a few options here, but one of the nice things about the software is that it can call a remote query, and then return the resulting data file. The data file is then stored locally, and merged with the text file you will create that is the boilerplate for the the email that will be received.

One important note, is that the first line will be considered the header. The header line names each of the fields contained on subsequent lines. If you have 100 people you will be emailing, the file will have 101 lines. One for the header, and one hundred lines of data. The minimal amount of data contained on each line will be the email address that will be sent to. In this case, the header line might just be "email", and each data line would look like something "test@gmail.com".

The text file that will be merged with the data file

Let's say you wanted to send a birthday greeting to all of your customers. The text of the file will look like this:

Happy Birthday Mike! Hope you have a great day./p>

Happy Birthday <<>>! Hope you have a great day.

The data file associated with this mailing would look something like this:

email, fname

test@gmail.com, Mike

one@yahoo.com, John

Where the text file has a "<<" followed by text that is in the header, followed by a ">>", the program will insert the field data in it's place.

Merging your document with a datafile

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Getting the data file

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