E-Mail Commander 1.1.4

reviewed by Robert Pritchett

Bulk up!

When I send out notification of each month’s magazine, I am limited by my ISP as to how many on the list the information can go out to, so I have to do the same message, over and over and over as a “Press Release”. Now I don’t have to anymore! I don’t have to send Emails to myself and blind-copy everybody else. If I have names instead of just Emails addresses, each Email becomes individualized, thus, more personal.

If I have folks in a “group”, E-Mail Commander takes advantage of the Mac OS X Address Book and treats each individual as, well, individuals!

And E-Mail Commander is HTML-able, but can be mixed with the plain text format. It also has a bounce-checker and can flag duplicate entries.

End the redundancy (and monotony) of sending out an Email blast!

Okay, ready for what worked for me? I found that to “import, I could only do one line at a time from FileMaker Pro exported data. I could import a column of data but not a whole row of info or a whole file as input so had to resort to adding the info manually. That was tedious. Maybe I didn’t follow directions or figure out the help file, so I blame myself for not figuring it out. But why can’t I just drag&drop?

Then I could not send “From:” until I had created a Send file in the List Manager. Anyway that was the error message I got. That stumped me for a while. Why didn’t the program lead me to the next step?

I did send to my notification list, but the ISP blocked the list after about 80 Emails, and I had to go back and then choose “imported” and not “successful and also OK to get the rest of the Emails out the door. Again, it took me a while to figure that out. Obviously not everything was “intuitive” for me. But I used it, and I will use it again. Why? Because it helps get past the ISP “don’t send bulk Email” activities by giving notice of when it gets part way through a list so we can pick up where we left of and continue. That is a strength and not a weakness. The weakness is that when the “disconnected” message appears there should be a “Continue” button and not just have the program say “Done” when it really isn’t.

Our final solution? We created a TextCast of macCompanion magazine in iTunes, so we don’t have to send out notices each month that the next issue is ready. We just have folks redirected off our site to iTunes to subscribe. It’s that simple. I only wish I’d known about that sooner, but that technology is new. Very new. I’d say even newer than this release of Email Commander. Email as a communicator is limited as a business activity because it has been ruined by Spam. Having folks visit a website, RSS feeds, Podcasts, VideoCasts and TextCasts help us work smarter and not harder.