Tips, tricks, tools, and techniques for Microsoft Office

Last week Dick Archer reviewed eMailMerge, a tool for simplifying Outlook mail merges. What if your mailing list is a long one? If you're responsible for sending notices to, say, your lengthy list of clients, new challenges arise, including ease of updating the mailing list and speed of delivery. Furthermore, many ISPs won't allow you to send more than 100 e-mail messages an hour. If your distribution list is more than 100 names long, you now have to send your e-mail in batches. What a hassle.

You can engage a mailing list service to do the job, but the fees add up quickly, even for lists with only a few hundred subscribers. If, as I do, you prefer a do-it-yourself approach, you need a program that allows users to sign up, change their own e-mail address, and resign from the list via the Web. It must be able to send hundreds of messages, archive a message, and handle multiple mailing lists (once word gets out you manage lists with such ease, you'll surely be asked to do "just one more"). Such programs require a Web host account, introducing a host of (usually) complex installation and/or maintenance chores.

BigSender, from Craig Richards Design (http://www.craigrichards.com), overcomes these problems. Though its $189 price tag is at the higher end of the range for mailing list programs, we've never seen such an extensive feature list as BigSender's, nor such flexibility, ease of setup, and strong tech support (included in the license fee). For the money, it's a steal.

BigSender, like all Web-based mail management programs, requires you have access to a Web server. That may sound daunting, but fortunately once you have registered a domain and secured a Web host (see our recommendation below), installing BigSender is as effortless as we've ever seen (and we've installed over a dozen mailing list managers since starting The Office Letter two years ago). You'll need an FTP program to get your files to your Web host, too, to get BigSender's key files onto your server, but once you launch the BigSender installation program from your site, almost everything else is automatic. I was pleasantly surprised.

Portion of the BigSender main screen

The installer senses most of your server's parameters; it's easy to set the rest. When an update is available, a button appears on the main screen; click it and the program installs the update automatically. I haven't seen that offered in any competitor.

The program can mail messages in text and/or HTML. It sent 100 combination-text-and-HTML messages in under 75 seconds using our Web host provider, The Host Group. That's a very respectable speed given the time of day and the message length. Naturally, your speed will vary.

BigSender is smart enough to accept the text message you create (or paste from Word, as I did) and create an HTML-compatible version. It's a bit crude (it doesn't convert numbered lists into their HTML equivalent, for example), but it gets the job done. If you're familiar with HTML, you can use the Compose Mail screen to compose the HTML version from scratch; I preferred to paste it in from an HTML editor (I used AceHTML).

You'll find a complete list of features at on the company's Web site, and I'll warn you that the information there may strike you as just a bit on the hyper-promotional side. Don't be offended -- they have lots to be proud of. It's almost as though the BigSender developers knew our wish list. The program supports double-opt-in (subscribers must confirm their subscription request -- just as you had to do when signing up for The Office Letter -- before they're added), and in our tests with Office Letter readers, there were few complaints about the formatting of the messages sent, primarily the result of the e-mail clients used. Testers with Outlook, Outlook Express, Notes, and Eudora clients generally had no problems reading our HTML messages.

You can import and export lists and even manage your own set of "extra" fields your auto repair business might want to keep subscriber name and e-mail address PLUS make and model of their car). Few mailing management programs allow you to keep extra data, and while it takes some thorough reading of the user guide to get the hang of things, I got used to it.

You can personalize your message (Dear John Doe, not Dear Valued Customer), send to all or a subset of your mailing list, remove duplicates, pause after a user-specified number of e-mails are sent (some hosts interpret repetitive e-mail sends as an endless loop in your program and thus shut it down), restart if mailings are interrupted, and save e-mail contents for reuse.

If you have Web experience, you'll be happy to know that BigSender isn't dumbed down. You can link to its functions from CGI scripts (to put a "subscribe" box on any page on your site, for example) and easily incorporate the HTML provided to add your own subscription management box (with add, change, and/or remove buttons) easily. The program license also permits as many administrators as you want for an unlimited number of lists on a single domain installation, which is quite generous. Since it's Web-based, BigSender works with any computer and browser, Macs and PCs, from any spot in the world. For one-person businesses, it means you can send a newsletter while on vacation without dragging along a laptop.

At least 2 percent of Office Letter messages bounce each week -- either the subscriber's e-mail box is full or they've changed e-mail addresses and not notified us. Bounce management is critical, and BigSender's solution is basic but amazingly simple to use: Create an e-mail address exclusively for bounced messages (I created bounce@officeletter.com), and enter this address in BigSender's configuration program. Launch Bounce Manager and BigSender searches bounce@officeletter.com's inbox looking for "bounced" messages, analyzes each for the cause of the bounce, and using a (customizable) list of phrases and smart logic, deletes addresses that had bounced. Easy, simple, quick. There is a downside to the one-bounce-and-you're-out logic (a single bounce because a subscriber's e-mail server is down may be too severe), but bounce management is rarely available in mailing list programs, and rarely are they so straightforward.

Not everything is perfect. You can manage multiple lists, but you'll have to get used to "gateways", its name for lists other than your first. It's a bit confusing. The report BigSender mails to you when your mailing is complete puts the message count and time completed in the header -- hardly intuitive. Finally, a word about nomenclature. The company refers to BigSender as an "online contact manager and email/web publisher." Don't confuse it with a PIM, however. Its principle purpose is to manage mailing lists to keep you in contact with your customers. It's for sending e-mail messages (though it can publish those messages to your Web site's archive pages).

These are minor complaints. BigSender has a wealth of features I haven't seen often in mailing list management programs, and certainly not at this price. If you're not afraid to get your hands wet with a Web hosting service (and it's not very hard), BigSender will do a fine job of handling your customer communications via e-mail.

If you're still wondering if the program is right for you, click the "demo" link at http://craigrichards.com/software/bigsender. It gives you a pretty good idea of how everything works by installing a demonstration version for your use on the craigrichards.com server. How slick is that?

Getting Started on the Web: A Recommendation

Every one who has a Web site has their horror stories to tell, and host services to recommend. Here's mine. If you're looking to get set up with a domain and Web host, I can heartily recommend The Host Group (http://www.officeletter.com/thehostgroup.html). We came across the Web hosting service by accident about two years ago, and have been hosting officeletter.com there ever since. I'm extremely pleased with its reliability and excellent customer service, and its control panel makes account management a no-brainer.

The Host Group offers low-cost accounts (if you only need the account for mailing, try a Plan 1 account ($9.95/month with no setup fee). They'll register a domain name for you for $12.95. Set up is a snap (especially if you're new to Web hosting) and nearly instantaneous, making it easy to get started establishing a mailing list manager such as BigSender.

-- James E. Powell

^ Top of page ^

If you like this newsletter, share the free edition with your friends and co-workers. Just point them to:

^ Top of page ^