e-mail

[wiltrot]

The church where I work wants to send the bulletin via e-mail. How is the best way to go about this? What is the most efficient way to do this? The secretary has about 60 recipients and can't send the file to them all at once (file size about 1.5mb). Is there a way to automate this? They are on a 56K modem. Thanks.

[Fruss Tray Ted]

That's quite a load for dial-up. What would be better is either getting broadband for about 10 more dollars a month, or utilizing some of the web space allotted with the dial-up account. Usually between 5 and 10 megs. All the church would have to do is upload it once per week. Then let everyone have a link to the site to download it on their own.

Search here and Google for building websites. You wouldn't have to be elaborate with the site if all you wanted to do was post a bulletin. Maybe one of the church members has one set up that they would be willing to host it for the church?

[Budfred]

There are a number of different ways to do this, SPAMmers do it everyday, but they actually send millions.

However, how to do it is dependent on the mail program used. I know with Outlook you can create a list of addresses in a folder and then just type in the name of the folder to send to all the addresses there. For instance, she could have a Bulletin folder with all 60 addresses. She would type Bulletin in the To: line, put her bulletin in the email and press Send. She could break it up into different groups if she wanted as well. The only thing is that it will still move slowly on dialup.

[Fruss Tray Ted]

If they can manage a 50kbps connection rate, depending on their phone lines, it should take about 4 minutes to send one email. What i'm not sure on is if it will take the same amount of time to send the same email to that many recipients.

If they are using Outlook Express 5 for example, the document could be put into the 'New mail' and the recipients need to be in the address book or contacts list. Then, when the email is composed, just click on the 'TO' button and this will open the page where they can put as many recipients in as they want.

[mjc]

1.5MB.......that seems a little on the large side, pastor into printing his sermons in the bulletin (does do novellas for sermons?).

You should probably look at some ways of cutting the size of that file.

Does it have lots of graphics/pics?

Some sort of "cutsie" background?

All of music embedded?

All of those and more will make it a very difficult task to send.

What kind of account does the church have....many ISPs have started restricting the number of emails that a non-business accounts can send at one time (this is becasue spam zombies are becoming a very big problem; spam zombie is a machine that has been trojanized to turn it into a spam machine to send spam under the control of a spammer). I have seen figures as low as 10 per send.


Here are a bunch of newsletter management tools....basically that is all you are doing.

http://www.webattack.com/freeware/co...linglist.shtml

[wiltrot]

Actually I was a little off on the file size. There are two files: one is 32.5 KB and the other is just over a megabyte. Yes, there are pictures but don't know all the details. She was trying to figure out why she couldn't send them all at once. I showed her how to group them but not sure if that worked for her. They do have a web site (under construction) and I did suggest putting them on the site and then giving out a notice of some kind via e-mail. I told them to contact their ISP to find out what's the maximum file size they can send, don't know if that will help. This is an attempt to cut back on paper & ink expense and also hoping to encourage some to read the bulletin. lol.

[wiltrot]

The cost for cable or DSL would be about $45 to $50 more. Cable or DSL is $100 for commercial. Their paying about $45 a mouth now.

[wiltrot]

Thanks.

[kayofcircles]

wiltrot: I think you need to encourage them to make that bulletin much smaller in file size. Fruss made the comment above about 4 minutes, but that's assuming that you get in the 50's..which some of us are nowhere near. I understand wanting to cut down on printing costs, but if they send out things that large, some of their members are going to be displeased big time. Seems to me that one could make an attractive bulletin with text and maybe just a couple of small clipart type things, and be well under that 1 MB. Besides, pretty sure my ISP won't even allow me to send anything over a MB anyway.