When you need to contact groups of people with the same information, bulk email saves mail costs and is more environmentally friendly. While programs like Apple Mail or Entourage allow you to send the same email to multiple people, most email programs don't offer a mail merge feature where you send customized email to individuals from a list. Mailings, from Limit Point Software, bridges that gap and does a great job. Unlike email subscription services, such as Constant Contact or iContact, Mailings has a one-time price of $25.00. You can send email to a large group of people, such as small business owners, user group members, marketing contacts, or even your extended family.

Mailings, only available from the Limit Point Software site, includes a limited time demo. The simple drag and drop installation includes great documentation and many example files, but you can jump into this easy to understand program without reading the documentation.

The opening screen includes all the needed options to choose your email file, mailing list or recipients, and sender. The Preferences include nine tabs in which you customize or tweak your settings. Mailings flexibility lets you work with your mail files and lists easily.

Main Window

You can choose your recipient list from a customized list in your Address Book, a list imported from Entourage, or a comma or tab separated file. While you can choose to which email addresses you want to send, such as work, home, or both, you must pick one type of email for everybody. You can't choose home for some and work for others. This is a minor but potentially annoying problem, but is common on most email products. However, if you combine Mailings’ ability to use Smart Groups within the Address Book, you can do some sophisticated database management. For example, I created a Smart Group within Address book for records updated after a certain date to indicate new people who signed up for my mailing list. This is a quick and easy way to welcome new customers or group members. When you’re ready to choose the content you want to mail, Mailings allows you to send a file or a web page. This is great for customized HTML-enhanced email that includes web graphics and specialty formatting - you know, the ones in which Apple Mail won't load the images because it ended up in the junk folder! You may also choose a Preamble and/or Epilogue for your mail, which is a fancy way of saying header and footer.

The Epilogue and Preamble options are where the Mailings magic comes into play. Just like when you print mailing labels in your word processor, Mailings allows you to personalize the email message so that “Hi” followed by the First Name field delivers ”Hi John.“ You may also insert AppleScript tags, which makes the program incredibly powerful for AppleScript gurus, which I am not.


Preamble Window

by David Greenbaum, Editor