Mail Factory 2.5

Reviewed by Harry {doc} Babad

BeLight Software, Ltd PO Box 47 65005, Odessa Ukraine +380 48 738-08-49 info@belightsoft.com http://www.belightsoft.com/products/mailfactory/overview.php $40 USD for the download with an added $9 USD S/H or the physical product, a CD; Academic Price $28 USD Released: February 8, 2007

Requirements: Mac OS 10.2 or later; Universal binary; 50 MB Hard Drive Space; Printer. Strengths: An absolutely easy to learn labeling application suitable for creating addresses or sheets of labels. Importing addresses, a problems with version 1.x, have been corrected, enhancing its usefulness and flexibility. Weaknesses: Nothing worth mentioning here upfront. Previous Reviews: Reviewed by Harry {doc} Babad and Ted Bade http://www.maccompanion.com/macc/archives/september2004/Shareware/MailFactory.html For a demo of this product: http://www.belightsoft.com/download/download.php Copyright Notice: Product and company names and logos in this review may be registered trademarks of their respective companies. The software was tested on a 1 GHz dual processor PowerPC G4 Macintosh with 2 GB DDR SDRAM running under OS X 10.4.9.

Introduction

When Ted and I previously reviewed this product, it had two primary weaknesses. First, it only accessed collected addresses from supported sources, the number of address containing programs supported were quite limited at the time. Second, there were some problems with address appearances.

Since that time, I’ve continued creating addresses (envelopes) and labels using a combination of MS Word (yuck) and the using address containing databases created in my Dymo LabelWriter 330 Turbo software. For other less often used addresses information, I could get that information from contact databases created in FileMaker Pro 6 [FMP.] Right now I have individual databases for professional contacts, suppliers of stuff, customers for our crafts business, and friends and family. — I’m going to get relational with FMP 8, real soon and get rid of record duplications.

My testing of Mail Factory differed from that reported by other reviewers. I neither use Apple’s mail (email application) or address book; nor the Microsoft’s products (Outlook or Entourage) I could test the products automatic access to these programs. Aside from my use of FMP, I also store email addresses and website information, in my familiar but long-in-tooth, Eudora eMail client. I seldom fill in the other contact address information in Eudora, because my databases are easier to search than Eudora.

As a result, extracting address for use in Mail Factory must work with FMP, if not, it would remain relatively useless to me, as was version 1.1.

Suggestion, to avoid data entry errors, most of my address input tasks are simplified, by using the CardIris, a business card scanner. I am a two finger dyslexic typist; so try to avoid a bad case of GIGO - http://www.maccompanion.com/macc/archives/April2006/Software/CardIris3.htm/.

Having recently reviewed and been well pleased with the other Belight products, http://www.maccompanion.com/documents/freeissues/2007/April2007.pdf, I felt it was time to recheck Mail Factory.

Its ability, in version 2.5, to extract address information from FileMaker Pro (wonderful) and Eudora (okay) makes an enormous difference in the product’s usefulness to me. In addition, its generic ability to import Tab-delimited text, which most Personal Information Managers [PIMs] can output their contents, should be important to other users who’ve waited for a more flexible product.

I have often wished, as you might have, that MS Word, the Apple or Microsoft’s address books and mail client features had better means for customizing and printing envelopes and labels. That’s why I was eager to re-review the product. I’m glad I did.

Product Overview

“Mail Factory is a Mac OS X software for designing and printing envelopes, post cards, address and shipping labels on your Macintosh. It conforms to postal guidelines, prints USA, Canada and UK mailing barcodes and includes special mailing features, like automatic address formatting.

Mail Factory lets you create custom label and envelope layouts—by dragging address elements, images, and more onto your chosen label or envelope—and then print them out using contacts from OS X’s Address Book, Entourage, Eudora, or a number of other contact databases. You can also use one of the included templates for pretty much any label or envelope printer, or let Mail Factory’s Assistant walk you through the process of creating your own format and style.”

Getting Started

Installation was traditionally simple, double-click the downloaded .dmg file. Then, double-click the Mail Factory installer icon in window that appears. Follow the installer instructions.

There are even uninstalling instructions in the ReadMe file. Okay, a confession, I used the version of Mail Factory that came with the Printfolio suite I reviewed last month, but it’s identical to the stand-alone product. Indeed, I had Version 2.4 on my hard disk, now deleted, but had never worked with it.

Click on the application, Mail Factory opens directly into its Assistant window — it helps you create labels or envelopes. One nice thing about Belight’s software — there are no preferences to adjust or personalize. That’s one less decision to make, wonderful.

You’ll note that there is a vast selection of available label formats from manufacturers (e.g., Avery, Decadry, DYMO, MACO, Xerox). Should you want to address an envelope, available formats include the more standard U.S., European, and Japanese sizes and configurations as well as many specialty formats for greeting cards or post cards.

Features & Functions (Annotated from the publishers website)

Address/Label Assistant — Once you choose your label or envelope, the Assistant guides you through the design process. After choosing your address layout, you can manually enter the address or import it from Apple's Address Book. Entourage, Eudora, FileMaker Pro, MS Excel, Now Contact, vCards, or tab-delimited text files. Ill be discussion address data import into Mail Factory later in this review.

Mail Merge — You can quickly print single envelopes and labels, or batch-print addresses from OS X Address Book, Entourage, Eudora, Now Contact, MS Excel, FileMaker, vCards or tab-delimited text files. Use the built-in storages of recipients' and senders' addresses to edit and store mailing lists.

Advanced Mailing
 — Mail Factory prints USPS POSTNET, Canada Post and Royal Mail barcodes on labels and envelopes to help expedite delivery, and correctly formats addresses for more than 50 countries. It contains 15 address templates (corporate, personal and extended ones) that simplify the process of address creation. 
Its unique address recognition feature allows you to paste an address as text from other applications — Mail Factory automatically formats it to the required postal standards and applies the barcode.

Flexible Printing — Mail Factory supports labels from most popular companies, including Avery, APLI, A–One, prints on DYMO (LabelWriter–series), Seiko (SLP–series) and Brother (QL–series) printers. Mail Factory can let you fine-tune the output to make up for variations in different printers' paper-feed and it is completely compatible with Dymo's LabelWriters.

Such advanced merge printing functionality is reportedly perfect for mass mailings.

The convenient print dialog in Mail Factory lets you make occasional final editing changes to the chosen labels and envelopes. Of course it will also let you see which labels will be printed. Also, you can choose the position of the next available label, on a sheet that you're printing to, so you can re-use partially used label sheets.

Label/Address Design Tools — Add personalized, corporate look to your mailings with dozens of ready-made designs. You can also insert custom images with your company logo or other graphics, apply masks and control transparency. More than 800 clip art images, collection of postcard designs and 100 unique masks are included. One thoughtful feature is the separate clip art library of all those special handling labels like “Magnetic Media” or “Fragile-Hand Stamp” that you so often need but never seem to have at hand. Furthermore, the fact the Mail Factory graphic interface was virtually identical to that in Business Card Composer, helped me to become instantly comfortable with designing labels and address with graphic elements.

The tools and Inspector windows offer the level of control and convenience that is common to the other Belight programs. You will rarely find a need to sift through the menu bar lists for a command or feature. Once you get acquainted with the software’s design features, you’ll wonder why other developers insist on forcing complex graphics interfaces on the hapless user.

What I especially like about the product was that I’d become familiar with the Belight Software design interface by using Business Card Composer, Swift Publisher, and Disc Cover so I had no essentially no learning curve to become comfortable with Mail Factory. To those of you new to the Belight products, what can I tell you? The design features are easy to use, and if on occasion you get stuck, the well written and easy to understand Help menu is just a click away.

Getting Ready To Test Mail Factory

Okay, I’ve admitted that I don’t use many of the sources need to automate the performance of Mail Factory. I decided to work with both Eudora and FileMaker Pro, after all that’s all I had. (My Apple address book contains only six or seven entries; three are variants of my business’ addresses).

Eudora — As part of this review, I dumped some address information, yes tediously field-by-field from my Dymo Address lists, into my Eudora address book. It was about time to add such information, at least for my frequently used contacts. That Eudora associated list became one test set. Alas when I imported the Eudora address book into Mail Factory, it was all there. Several dozen sets of compete address and hundred of blanks (just folks names) or incomplete entries. But I knew that was going to happen.

The Address Book Access Thing From FileMaker Pro — Since most my addresses are in FMP databases, as noted earlier, I had two choices — Export/import tab delimited addresses or export addresses directly from FMP. I ended up creating two alternative test sets, from my 3,000 records FMP professional contacts database. They turned out to be identical.

By using FMP’s export feature, extracting only address related information from my database I was able to import information into Mail Factory and to easily map it. During the process of using FMP’s export (to tab-text) feature, I ignored the information in the FMP database about folks emails, websites, wife and children's names, birth dates — you know the rest of the PIM stuff.

Tab Delimited Text — Use this format when exporting from FMP or a PIM, and then import them into Mail Factory. Specifically, in FMP you select the fields you want exported.

Title/Salutation	Name_First	Middle Initial (Optional)
Name_Last	Affiliation	Street Address
Street Address_2 (In Principal)	City	State
Zip	Country

Such address parts need to be in the correct order to simplify mapping the imported records to the Mail Factory. Since you can export a selected part (found set) or all of a FMP database to a tab-text file this is a good way to get started. Doing so is an initial, minor, hassle, but was easy to do. Indeed, exporting addresses is better than cutting and pasting them individually each time you want use an address in Mail Factory. By the way, if your database was configured to keep the city-state-zip information as one field, you’ll need to create a custom address template. If you, in days gone my have a mixed set of data, you need to fix each individual address that contains a combined city-state-zip as you need it.

Despite my rapid success with exporting tabbed-text from FileMaker Pro, exporting addresses directly to Mail Factory was more trouble. I used my 3000 items professional contacts database for testing. My problems were based on the structure of the databases I created. My contacts databases, whose initial content was created on my first Macintosh, have evolved, perhaps mutated, into my current FMP contact databases.

Direct Export From File Maker Pro — For the second test of FMP address data, I worked entirely within Mail Factory. I used the program itself to extract the FMP address containing information.

None of the problems in using FMP as a source of Mail Factory addresses, described below, were caused by problems created by the Mail Factory interface. They were due entirely to the pedigree and organization of my databases, which had evolved over my years of using a Macintosh to store address information.

I’ll detail those FMP export problems and their solution in my June Tips column.

Never the less, I could have saved my self an hour of trial and error importing FMP addresses by seeking help. I should have checked Mail Factories Help, then and there, the folks at Belight are conscientious about writing good help files. But I didn’t, I tried to tough it out. If I’d checked I would have found in the Help files, an item called — Mail Factory Help > Integration with Third-Party Databases and Contact Managers > Importing Data from a FileMaker Database. For most folks, these instructions would have done the job.

In reality, the way my data views in FMP were configured, during my fist attempt at data extraction, I sucked in the whole record (say PIM please). That information from my existing, more complex data views (full PIM information) made it frustratingly difficult to map only address-associated data.

My FMP databases are an accumulation of contacts exported from MS File, and AppleWorks. They also represent countless database formate revisions, some which were created on my SE-30. Finally, they are an accumulation of what, often partial, information I had the time, not the full sets of contact information I get when I scan business cards.

I knew I had to find a better way.

Therefore I eventually created a new view (report) in my professional contacts database that focused only on address list attributes. That greatly facilitated the direct export process.

Mail Factory gleans information from whichever report (view) you’ve last used in the database. (This observation in not in the otherwise excellent documentation.)

It turned out that by using a (report form) focused solely on address list information, ordered appropriately, mapping the information to Mail Factory was indeed simple

Address Extraction from FMP — Use FMP’s Export Features.

Dealing With Other Address Data Sources — An addition feature of the product is its ability to deal with non-address addresses. If your address source is a web page or eMail, the software’s “Paste as Address” option will intelligently parse your clipboard’s contents and insert them into the appropriate address field.

Is all of this worth the trouble? Yes. Once you make the commitment to one of the supported address books or extracting addresses from a database e.g., Eudora or FMP), mailing with Mail Factory moves much faster and beat the heck out of the alternatives

Okay, I’ve the best set of address data I could acquire imported into Mail Factory, What’s next? Obviously I could now get onto the business of creating envelopes and labels.

Working With Envelopes or Labels

Creating An Envelope — Open Mail Factory and you see the Assistant, ready to create labels or envelopes for you. We’ll start with envelopes, although I alternate between printing labels and printing addressed envelopes. Its left hand window shows a long list of envelope names and sizes. A preview pane at the right shows the relative sizes of the envelopes as you select (click) between them. Now, since I only use to US No.10 business envelopes or more rarely to a #6 envelope size for bills and letters to friends. My LabelWriter is loaded transparent labels that I use for holiday or greetings cards or larger envelopes – envelopes I don’t want to push through my color laser HP printer. The other envelope sizes are of little interest to me, but they’re available when needed.

I did not do much with the ability to add graphics to my envelopes. I did a test or three using the design window to add clip-art, photos, or other designs a test #10 envelope. Since I’m not into personalizing envelopes, not even with my business’ logos, but you may like it. You can even use downloaded images from Google, if you like, personalizing your envelopes. By transferring the image to your word processor, you can even create a stationary set, but this is easier to do in Belight’s Swift Publisher.

Creating a Label Sheet — The capability to create label sheets from your address lists allows you to avoid having to feed envelopes though your printer. To do so, you will need to Mail Factory’s label assistant. The Assistant’s list of included label sheets is impressive, and included the Avery address label stock I use. If I had not had a Mail Factory supplied template available. I could have created a custom label layout to fit the labels I had. That's cheaper than buying new labels and tastier than printing off center or poorly spaced labels. The tools are there, except for a ruler, which you’ll need to provide the label assist the needed label dimensions. Fingers work too, so you can count the number of labels on a sheet.

A Kudo – Mailing Tips to Save You Time and Money

Postal service in the USA and some other countries uses special equipment that sorts mail automatically and helps to deliver mail faster and more accurately (and sometimes at less cost). To qualify for automated processing, your mail must be prepared properly. Check out the Postal Guidelines in Mail Factory’s help.

Minor Discomforts

Street Address_2 and Other Glitches — Many of the business addresses I use require a two line street address. I could not, in the time I had available for review and testing, figure out how to add the second street address line. It is likely, based on my reading of the Mail Factory help files, that I need to create a custom template with two address lines, sometimes soon. Real soon.

The “comma” Inc. Problem — Many of my address in FMP lists the affiliates as the So-and-So Company, Inc. The Mail Factory import process treated anything following the comma as a separate data “field” separator. I’m not sure I can resolve this issue, except on a case-by-case basis. To do so would require manually adding the word “Inc.” to each address to which it applied. Alternatively, my solution, ignore the absence of “Inc.” — Again not a Mail Factory Problem.

To Zoom or Target — Zooming, in contact view, to tune an address on an envelope, does not focus on the selected field (Sender or Addressee). It would be nice to zoom to the spot I want to fix, having previously selected it.

Conclusion

Mail Factory from BeLight Software is an excellently crafted program that produces great looking labels and envelopes with a minimum of effort. Its interface, like the other programs in the Printfolio suite, is clean and intuitive. The software’s rich and varied features are conveniently accessible but never obtrusive.

My testing showed, the program was solid and stable. Perhaps due to the import problems caused by my FMP databases, I did not notice any rough edges in the interface or gotcha’s that interfered with its use. (There’s a bit of that in other reviewers’ comments, but I found nothing in such Google posted reviews worthy of repeating.) For a change, I have no serious suggestions for improvements to this product.

BeLight has been shipping regular updates for all of its products, responding to user feedback and an evolving Macintosh operating system. They continue to add, an impressive array of new features with each release. Compare the features and limitations of version 1.1 to 2.5, a quantum leap of enhancements over a period of a bit more than a year. So now when I want to print an envelope, I click on Mail Factory, select the address and do so. Alternatively, if the address has not been entered into the Mail Factory database, I manually add it. Then it’s available for future use.

Recommendation

My editor insists I answer the following question. “What you’d suggest a friend consider before spending hard-earned cash on this product. If you are tired of struggling with the paltry address features in MS Word, or Apples address and mail utilities, order this product.

Unless your address collections are as dispersed and messed up as mine, you’ll get instant gratification. Despite all the initial problems, I had importing my FMP address collection into Mail Factory; it was well with the effort. Now if I want to write a letter to Dr. XXX at MIT, a contact I made in 1974, I’m a click or two away from an addressed envelope. [Yes I checked the Internet; he’s been prompted but is still on the faculty?]

This program has a lasting place on my hard drive; let it be so for you,

Doc.