Save me from working over the weekend!

April 4, 2008 10:14 AM

BoringFilter: I have to send out a large group of emails (around 175), and I would love to use mail merge to do it, but there is an annoying twist...

...each of the recipients needs to get a message with an individual file attached. The files (.pdf's if it mattes which it should) are all clearly labeled and in a directory, and I have an excel list of recipients ready to go.

My question is whether I can automate this task to some degree rather then just individually sending this message out many many times.

Also, all programs are of the microsoft office 2007 variety, and I am using Vista Pro.

posted by BobbyDigital to computers & internet (6 comments total)

One solution I can come up with is to do this in php. You can export the excel file as text and dump all the pdfs in a separate directory. Then read email file into an array, loop through till the end, and use the mail function to send individual emails with the corresponding pdf attachment.

It should take just a few lines of code.
posted by special-k at 10:25 AM on April 4, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

That would work, but I am not going to be able to figure out how to do it, and we dont have anybody capable of coding at my workplace.

Is there any way to insert the files into an excel itself so that they are associated with the recipients?
posted by BobbyDigital at 10:41 AM on April 4, 2008

I love special-k's idea. I'm not a coder, and I'm therefore obviously unable to program in php. How long would it take to figure out? Weeks? Months?

Anyway, as BobbyDigital probably knows, you can't send pdfs as attachments using Mail Merge. Generally, the only way I've been able to overcome this by converting the pdf to word format or html and inserting it into the body of the email, or by hosting the pdf online and providing a link in the email so people can download it themselves. You could link to individual pdfs for each recipient. However, from a security perspective, this is not so good.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:53 AM on April 4, 2008

Do you have Microsoft Access? This product looks as if it will do what you want. Free trial. It's easy to import your excel file into Access.
posted by desjardins at 11:00 AM on April 4, 2008

include attachments in an access database

ok, I'm totally running late now.
posted by desjardins at 11:01 AM on April 4, 2008

Just for any others finding this question, who might not have Access 2007 available to them, the Mail Merge Toolkit (which I use for some emails at work) will allow you to assign files to attach to emails, very similar to how your regular mail merge fields work.
posted by gemmy at 5:24 PM on April 4, 2008