(I found an easier way… see this post)
I wanted to send groups mails with individual salutation at a scheduled date and time. There’re several free scripts / apps out there to do this. I’ve tried probably all of them but none really worked (I’m running on Snow Leopard).
There’re paid apps to do this but then I don’t wanna pay. (Yes, I proudly admit I’m cheap in this sense.)
Ok, if I only wanted the individual salutation part, Serial Mail is a good one and it’s free. It doesn’t only support names as placeholders but also other fields in the Address Book. It’s also got an iPhone app! One very good news for iPhone user as the built in mail app in iPhone doesn’t support group mail.
So… what to do?
After many trials and errors, my final solution is “Automator + iCal".
There’s this built-in app in Mac called “Automator". Honestly, I didn’t have a clue what it is for the first two or three years I switched to Mac. I don’t use it that frequently until very recently. Anyway, to the steps:
To send GROUP EMAILS WITH INDIVIDUAL SALUTATION with Automator immediately:
- Launch Automator: New workflow
- Mail: New Mail Message (add by drag and drop) – For group mail, leave “To:", “Cc:" and “Bcc:" blank. Do fill in the Subject line, write your mail in “Message", choose account if you have multiple accounts set up. NO ATTACHMENT. If you want individual salutation, don’t write “Dear xxx" at the beginning of your mail.)
- Contacts: Find Address Book Groups – Find people / groups and define it
- Mail: Group Mailer – check “Add Greeting" if you want to have individual salutation. Otherwise, uncheck it.)
- Mail: Send Outgoing Messages
If you want to send your mails immediately, click “Run" on the top right corner. But if you want to send your group mail later at a specific date and time… go on with the following steps:
- Save as application (remember where you’ve saved it. You’ll need its path soon.)
- Open iCal and set up a new event at the time you want you mail to be sent
- Set alarm -> open file -> choose the application you’ve just saved two steps ago
- Done
If you don’t want the new event to stick in your calendar, add the following steps after step 5:
- Find iCal Events (Find events, All of the following are true, Title is “title of your new event"…)
- Delete iCal Events
But it’s probably easier to just delete it from calendar afterwards 😛
What about if you just want to SCHEDULE ONE SINGLE EMAIL?
- Launch Automator: New workflow
- Mail: New Mail Message (add by drag and drop) – Type your recipients’ email address in “To:", “Cc:" and “Bcc:" as needed. No auto-fill here. You may click the vCard icon on the right to choose recipients from Address Book. Before hitting “Done", remember to hit “To" after choosing. Do fill in the Subject line or it’ll ., Write your mail in “Message", choose account if you have multiple accounts set up. NO ATTACHMENT.)
- Send Outgoing Messages
- Save as application (remember where you’ve saved it. You’ll need its path soon.)
- Open iCal and set up a new event at the time you want you mail to be sent
- Set alarm -> open file -> choose the application you’ve just saved two steps ago
- Done
Important notes:
* It’s VERY IMPORTANT to save your workflow as APPLICATION in scheduled email. If you save it as workflow, it’ll only call out the workflow without running it, which means… it won’t do anything.
* NO ATTACHMENT: Someone said here that we may add attachment to group mailer in Automator but it never worked for me. And even if it works, it won’t work with scheduled mail anyways – it requires manual input when mails are being generated. My workaround is to upload the file to a server / website, then paste the link in the mail body. The “New Mail Message" in Automator does recognize URL so if your recipients can see HTML mail, they should be able to just click and see your file.
16 留言
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27 七月, 2010 於 10:37 下午
Matt Minde
Thank you thank you! Great solution, if somewhat cumbersome to set up! —MM
27 七月, 2010 於 11:05 下午
joannalaforet
Make sure you also read the “easy way" post as well. That one should be less cumbersome.
31 七月, 2010 於 4:09 上午
Matt Minde
Yep! Will do! Except all the examples are in a newer OS; I was amazed to find enough of this functionality in OSX 10.4 (we’re dinosaurs, technologically, here at the News). I did make the iCal scheduled event repeat indefinitely, and now all I need do is to change the content of the outgoing message weekly; everything else works like set-and-forget! THANKS again!—MM
14 一月, 2011 於 6:14 下午
paul
hi, thats a great post! everything works but for some reason the emails signature is not included and the automator just generates each personalised email but it doesnt send the emails? any idea how to solve these two issues? thanks!
14 一月, 2011 於 8:06 下午
joannalaforet
Do you mean the email signature you’ve assigned in Mail app? That doesn’t apply to the mails generated from Automator. You’ll have to paste it in the mail you write in Automator (and sadly, formats like font size and color will be gone as well).
Btw, I’ve recently experienced some bugs in Automator generated emails: some of the mails generated are blank. So, be careful when you use Automator to generate emails! I’ve filed a bug report to Apple but you never know when Apple would actually address the bugs…!
About sending out the emails… you sure you put “send outgoing messages" in Automator? I’m not sure why. But do check out the “easy way" post (there’s a link in this post… in the very first sentence), that one should work more easily.
15 一月, 2011 於 9:23 上午
john hess
Thanks very much for your write up.
I got it to work, but also notice that there’s no SIg file attached to the created emails. That’s fine, I guess.
I think that everytime I run a test, an email with no addressee is left open in my mail program. Using a greeting appears to cause a problem, I don’t know why. No greeting, the emails send fine. With greeting, I get an error (check the action’s properties and try running the workflow again).
PS. Serial Mail gagged on something and didn’t work.
20 一月, 2011 於 5:00 上午
joannalaforet
Consider that “empty mail" left in Mail App after sending the group emails…a feature 😦
Somehow it’s there. Can’t understand why and can’t get rid of it either.
20 一月, 2011 於 2:48 上午
emitemagree
I have been reading out some of your stories and i can state pretty good stuff. I will definitely bookmark your site.
20 一月, 2011 於 5:01 上午
joannalaforet
Thanks 🙂 This will encourage me to be less lazy and write a bit more often 😛
28 二月, 2011 於 4:58 上午
Olmo - ebook elecric cars
Hi,
great solution. I’m having some trouble sending bulk emails. I followed your instructions, but as soon as automator runs the “" section, It creates different email messages without content, only with the “salutation" from the group mailer block.
It seems like the group mailer will delete the content to put the salutation. If I run it without salutation, it will work exactly as you write….
any workaround?
Olmo
1 三月, 2011 於 2:07 上午
joannalaforet
I’ve been experiencing the same problem for some months, too. Haven’t really figured a way to fix it yet. Could be a bug in mail app introduced in recent updates. This method was very reliable back then. May have to file a bug report to Apple. Sigh… Will reply you here if I somehow figure out how to fix this.
4 三月, 2011 於 3:53 上午
joannalaforet
Hi Olmo,
I’ve tried again the automator workflow just now and it somehow worked. So it seems to me that it’s not a consistent “bug". My suggestion is, though it sounds really stupid, take all your mailboxes OFFLINE before you run the workflow so that you won’t be sending out empty messages. Only take them online again after you see the generated mails popping up with the correct content. I know it’s stupid but then…
Joanna
1 七月, 2011 於 12:50 上午
tinyheartbeat
Thank you! This totally worked. Lord knows why you just can’t do it from within mail, as in outlook.
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