whither bulk mail on osx

August 16, 2005 11:50 PM

A good friend of mine uses the application BULK MAILER+ to maintain an address list for an academic organization. He uses various flags in the notes field to sort addresses by membership year, indicate specific officers of the organization, whether or not they organize sessions at each year's annual meeting, etc. However, now he's on OSX and we're wondering if the only option is to run the app in Classic (Satori Software seems to have no intention of creating an OSX version) - or is there something else he should be using?
posted by luriete to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Firstly, I'm shocked nobody's posted telling you that SPAM IS WRONG. But since you're not talking about spam...

I recommend IntelliMerge. I've used it through several versions and have always been pleased with it's performance and capabilities. You can create messages that are personalized and take that personalization to great lengths, given the right data about the recipient.
posted by lrivers at 5:18 AM on August 17, 2005

We used to use MaxBulk Mailer X at work weekly before our web host added better "real" mailing list software. It worked well, but real majordomo/mailman/whatever lists are *always* superior to trying to do this stuff on the desktop end.

If your friend is really using the application to maintain complicated membership data, would s/he consider switching to a dedicated database program? A lot of academic organizations that use Macs already have licenses for something like FileMaker Pro, which will keep much better track of things like this. It won't do the mailing itself without some fiddling (and possibly purchase of plugins), but you could hand off the finished lists to a mailing program with a click of a button.
posted by bcwinters at 5:55 AM on August 17, 2005

I would think a large Excel document should be able to take care of this.

First_Name, Last_Name, Address1, Address2, City, State, Zip, Member_Since, Position, Meeting_Session_Responsible_For, Notes

You could then just sort by the field you're interested in, and pull out the important information, then mail merge it...
posted by pwb503 at 9:48 AM on August 17, 2005

Actually, this is for USPS bulk mailing - sorting by zipcode, etc - to the membership of the organization, as well as making address lists for the bulk mail house to send out people's journal subscriptions - not spam, emailed or otherwise!

He needs an easy to use front end, and needs to be able to sort and isolate records, and be able to export into comma or tab delimited text just those fields (i.e., name, institution, workaddress, workcity, workstate, workzip+4) so he can give mailing lists to the folks who mail out the newsletters and journals.

I will investigate the products you suggested but they sound like more for emailing than actual real snail-mailing.
posted by luriete at 3:45 PM on August 17, 2005

Ack! no answers for actual USPS mail. Oh well, thanks anyway!
posted by luriete at 10:12 AM on August 18, 2005