The List Mailer Utility is a program to compile and send HTML e-mail merge messages
to a list of contacts. The emails can be formatted in HTML (including images) and
all parts of the email can be sourced from the merge fields.
Note: This is intended for personal or club/society use, NOT for
SPAM.
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Screen Shots
Overview
Originally the product was written to send a Christmas email to my friends and family.
There are other products on the "market" but I had a large chunk of SMTP
code that I had written which needed testing, so I though I would just add a quick
GUI to it, and hey presto, another product for the WEB site.
That was a year ago. Since then the code has been through two major overhauls, one
front end and one engine, and most recently, a pre-production phase of debugging.
This debugging phase has actually taken a couple of months and has lead to a significant
number of bug fixes and changes in both the product code and the underlying libraries.
Features
- Define the fields of the merge list, import from any text file source, and edit
the list, all within the List Mailer.
- Define merge fields use, both within the merge document and for any part of the
email.
- Email written in HTML for effective layout and formatting.
- Images in HTML compiled into the email as embedded resources.
- Preview the email before sending it.
- Back ground email sending using asynchronous SMTP.
Technical Points
The most challenging aspect of this project has been to get the multi-threaded,
asynchronous SMTP layers of code working smoothly. In fact, I still feel a little
uneasy about the level of testing that this code has received, not due to lack of
effort on my part, but more to lack of target SMTP servers in different environments
against which to test. All feedback welcome !
Acknowledgements
During testing I used an free mail server called hMailServer. This dramatically
speeded up debugging of the SMTP layers, but I will also certainly be using this
software as a full mail server for my home environment the future.
I would like to acknowledge the excellent tools in the Development Tools section
on my Links page.