Almost same message to different recipients

P

Patrick

I have to send similar message to 9 colleagues, with minor differences
(Dear X, may be a number somewhere in the text, and the email address
evidently).
I can duplicate a message and change manually, but as I have to do this
each week, I am looking for a quicker solution. Is there a script or a
quick way to do this ?

Thanks,

Patrick
 
B

Barry Wainwright

I have to send similar message to 9 colleagues, with minor differences
(Dear X, may be a number somewhere in the text, and the email address
evidently).
I can duplicate a message and change manually, but as I have to do this
each week, I am looking for a quicker solution. Is there a script or a
quick way to do this ?

Thanks,

Patrick
Click to expand...

Certainly it can be scripted, but such a script would have to be coded to
suit your particular purpose. Perhaps an easier route would be to use word's
'mail merge' feature to send a for, letter to each recipient - 'by email' is
one of the output options for mail merge.
 
P

Patrick

Barry Wainwright said:
Certainly it can be scripted, but such a script would have to be coded to
suit your particular purpose. Perhaps an easier route would be to use word's
'mail merge' feature to send a for, letter to each recipient - 'by email' is
one of the output options for mail merge.
Click to expand...

Thank you, I did not know it was possible to 'merge' to email, it is a
nice possibility. Would be better if I could select a group instead of a
category or individual adresses.

Which brings me to the old question of why are the name and first name
in the wrong field in Entourage adress book ? for the messages I
received and which are automatically added to the adress book, this
always happen. Any easy way yo correct this ?

Patrick
 
P

Paul Berkowitz

Thank you, I did not know it was possible to 'merge' to email, it is a
nice possibility. Would be better if I could select a group instead of a
category or individual adresses.
Click to expand...

You can use my free script Make Group Contacts (at

MacScripter.net <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

) to apply a category of the same name as the group to all group members,
making individual contact for each member if needed. Then you can use Word's
Mail Merge, Query by Category.
Which brings me to the old question of why are the name and first name
in the wrong field in Entourage adress book ? for the messages I
received and which are automatically added to the adress book, this
always happen. Any easy way yo correct this ?
Click to expand...

It doesn't "always happen" to me. It can happen when the display name of the
sender is more than two words long. When the display name is two names
"Patrick Someone", it puts "Patrick" in First Name and "Someone" in Last
Name. If the display name is one word "Patrick" it puts it in First Name. If
there's no display name at all (e.g. try Add to Address Book with a message
from <[email protected]> in this newsgroup, if you're using Entourage to
read news messages - which you're not) it puts nothing at all in either
First Name or Last Name, exactly as it should do. What happens with these
contacts who have no display name at all is that their email address appears
in the Name column of the Address Book in Entourage 2004 (but not in X,
where it remains blank) - but they are not alphabetized correctly: they all
bunch together in apparently random order at the top, above all the contacts
with display names. Is that what you're think of?

The only issues I've seen with wrong last Name, etc. is for contacts with
more than two names. Entourage puts only the very last name (after the last
space) as Last Name, and everything else as First Name. There's no way it
can guess for exceptions to this rule, which works about 98% of the time,
correctly adding middle names or middle initials to first name. At least
this is true for Entourage 2004: I do believe it may have been less sensible
in Entourage X.

Give an example or two of where First and Last Name are "always" in the
wrong field please. Are these messages coming from some mail program that
puts "Last, First" with a comma between? And do you use Entourage 2004 or
earlier?


--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.
 
P

Patrick

Paul Berkowitz said:
Give an example or two of where First and Last Name are "always" in the
wrong field please. Are these messages coming from some mail program that
puts "Last, First" with a comma between? And do you use Entourage 2004 or
earlier?
Click to expand...

I use Entourage 2004, and it happens with messages coming from the
corporate Exchange server. They come in the form "Last, First" and I get
"Last," in the first name and "First" in the last name.

I see you have written a lot of scripts for Entourage, did you do one to
fix this yet ?

Patrick
 
P

Paul Berkowitz

I use Entourage 2004, and it happens with messages coming from the
corporate Exchange server. They come in the form "Last, First" and I get
"Last," in the first name and "First" in the last name.

I see you have written a lot of scripts for Entourage, did you do one to
fix this yet ?
Click to expand...


tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
set backToFronts to every contact whose first name ends with ","
repeat with theContact in backToFronts
tell theContact
set {realFirst, realLast} to {last name, first name}
try
set realLast to text 1 thru -2 of realLast
on error
set realLast to ""
end try
set {first name, last name} to {realFirst, realLast}
end tell
end repeat
display dialog "All done!"
end tell


--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.
 
P

Patrick

Paul Berkowitz said:
tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
Click to expand...


Wow ! thank you very much, worked like a charm ! I like AS, but it would
taken me hours to get there...

Patrick
 
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