Send Email

The Drawing - Send Email menu selection is enabled when the optional Business Tools extension has been installed and the focus is on a drawing window or on a drawing layer in a map window that contains points, lines or areas. The command is also available when the focus is on a table window. If you have not activated the Business Tools extension with a valid Business Tools serial number you will not be able to use the Send Email command.

Manifold's Send Email command adds direct email capability to Manifold System. If you have data that contains an email address in some data attribute field, you can automatically email to objects using those email addresses. Send Email works by sending email through the Windows MAPI email layer. If applications that also use MAPI such as Outlook or Outlook Express have been installed the email will end up being routed through the Outlook or Outlook Express outbox.

Using a computer that already has Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express installed is recommended because Outlook provides a simple means of checking that your system has been configured to correctly send email. Before attempting to operate Send Email make sure you can send email from Outlook. If you can't send email with Outlook, please fix that problem first.

Controls

From	Enter an email to appear as the "from" email. When emailing on a system that has Outlook installed, whatever is the default email sending account for Outlook will appear in the "from" header in the emails regardless what is entered into this From field.
To	Choose the field that contains email addresses. For example, if we have a drawing of points representing customers where the drawing's table has an "email" field that contains each customer's email address, we would choose the email field. Email addresses must be in the form username@domain, for example, sales@manifold.net Addresses in the form "Manifold Sales" <sales@manifold.net> will not work.
Skip duplicates	Email only once to each email address if more than one selected record has the same email address. Checked by default.
Subject	Enter text to appear as the subject field for each email.
Message	Enter a text message to appear as the body of each email. If we have a longer email, it may be more convenient to compose the message as a text file and to then copy from the text file and to paste into the dialog. A Manifold project might have several email texts on hand in the form of comments components that can be copied and pasted into the Message dialog box as desired.
Expand column references	Expand escape sequences containing column names to column values. Checked by default.
OK	Send the emails.
Cancel	Exit without sending email.

The Subject and Message texts can contain the names of columns in square brackets [ ]. Sending email messages will automatically replace the column names with data from those columns from the relevant table records.

To send email from Manifold:

1. Open a drawing or table that contains a field with an email address.

2. Select the objects in the drawing or the records in the table to which email should be sent.

3. Choose Send Email from the main Drawing or Table menu.

4. Fill in a value for the From field (will be overridden by the Outlook default From account setting if Outlook is used).

5. Choose the column name that contains email addresses for the To setting.

6. Enter whatever text is desired for the Subject and Message boxes and press OK.

7. Email message will automatically be created for each selected object and loaded into the Outbox for Outlook.

Example

Let's imagine that John's Gas Stations is a company operating a chain of gas stations in Northern California. The company wishes to send an email message to each congressional representative in whose district they operate a gas station to urge opposition to a proposed law that would force the company to raise prices.

$images\eg_send_email_01.gif$

We begin with a map that has two layers: a drawing layer called Congress showing congressional districts and containing the email address for each congressional representative, and a drawing layer called Facilities that shows the location of our gas stations.

$images\eg_send_email_02.gif$

With the focus on the Congress layer, we select the desired districts in the Congress layer using the above settings in the transform toolbar.

$images\eg_send_email_03.gif$

The result is that each congressional district containing one of our gas station facilities has been selected.

$images\eg_send_email_04.gif$

If we open the Congress drawing's table (with the selection filter button pushed in so that only selected records appear) we can see the data for the selected districts. Note that a field called Email contains the email address for each representative.

$images\eg_send_email_05.gif$

We launch the Send Email command and fill it the boxes as seen above. Note the use of field names in square brackets [ ] that will be substituted for each email with the appropriate value for that record. For example, the subject text in the email sent to congressman Pete Stark will have the Subject text of

Important Message for Pete Stark

and the Message body in the email will begin

Dear Representative Stark,

The use of square brackets and appropriate data fields provides a degree of personalization for what might otherwise be read as an impersonal mass mailing.

When we press OK the system will create six email messages, one for each selected object, and will pass them through the Windows MAPI layer for sending. If we have Outlook installed, the messages will end up in the Outlook mailbox, ready for sending.

Emails Must be Valid

Send email can only work with email addresses that are correct email addresses. If the table used contains an invalid email address, the send email process will stop with an error message when it hits that record.

For example, if sending email to sales@manifold.net a typographic error that inserts an unnecessary space as in sales @manifold.net or sales@manifo ld.net would result in an invalid email address that will stop the send email process.

An easy way to find invalid email addresses is to use the Query Toolbar with the not button pushed in and the Containing Match to search for the regular expression given below:

([\w\.!#\$%\-+.]+@[A-Za-z0-9\-]+(\.[A-Za-z0-9\-]+)+)

Pressing Select in the query toolbar will find all records that do not have valid email addresses. Using the selection filter in the table to show only selected records, the malformed email addresses may then be corrected or their records deleted.

As an alternative, we can use the Edit - Find command with the regular expression box checked to search through email field using the regular expression given above.

Copy and paste the above regular expression from this Help topic into the Find box. The regular expression will select records that have valid email addresses. Using Edit - Select Inverse we can invert the selection to find all those records not matching the above regular expression.

Using Outlook and Outlook Express

When sending a lot of mail, the system works much faster if Outlook or Outlook Express has already been launched before Send Email begins sending mail messages.

The emails will be created and placed in the Outlook Outbox. They will be sent the next time Outlook sends and receives mail. If you have Outlook set up to automatically send and receive mail using a full-time Internet connection, the email will go out with the next send/receive operation. If you are using a dial-up line, connect to your ISP and check mail as you normally would and the emails will go out at that time.

Emails will be passed to Outlook and Outlook will do the actual mailing. If you look in the Outbox before the mail gets sent and see a name instead of an email address for a record, check your Outlook Contacts to see if you have that particular email address entered as a Contact with a different name in your Outlook installation. In such cases Outlook is taking the email address passed by Manifold and substituting a name based on the Contacts information. The mail will still be sent properly; Outlook is just trying to be helpful by showing you the name associated with that email address.

When Outlook is installed, the From field will be inherited from however you have set up Outlook. There are methods to alter the From field by establishing an account with a fake originator address and (temporarily) setting this account to be the default for Outlook; however, if you are planning on doing such things you already know how to do this. Please don't use such techniques for spam purposes.

Outlook and Outlook Express may raise a confirmation box when Send Email is used to confirm that the user allows sending of email from a different program. This is an anti-spam measure that is intended to prevent viruses or other malign programs from using a computer's Outlook installation to send spam without the user realizing it. However, such confirmation boxes can be highly annoying when sending lots of email using Send Email.

Mail confirmation message boxes displayed by the Outlook Express can be disabled by checking off the "Warn me when other applications try to send mail as me" option in the Outlook Express Tools - Options - Security menu. Unfortunately, Outlook XP does not appear to have the same option (a good reason to use Outlook Express when working with Send Email).

Paging

Keep in mind that the ability to send email is also the ability to page someone via email. If we keep the right pager email addresses in the map's data fields, we can use Send Email to page people. Cool!

It is important to know the terms and conditions the pager service provider has for their email to pager service. An email paging service may require us to know the pager’s PIN number as well as one or more numeric identifiers for that pager. For example, to send a page, one might be required to use an email address in the form

8007208398.9801155@pagercompany.com

Pay attention to the maximum message lengths acceptable to the pager service provider. Some providers will take long messages and split them into multiple pages sent to the pager. In such cases, the messages we send to the pager should be kept short.

Not all email to pager services can handle all of the fields that may appear in a normal email message. Some services cannot handle a Subject: line while others encourage it.

Note that not all pager companies allow pages via email. Some companies provide this service only to national customers and do not offer it to regional pager service customers. Other companies do not provide it at all. Some companies say they have an “email to pager” service, but it is a restricted service that does not allow general email as is commonly used throughout civilized society.

Examples of annoying restrictions include required use of proprietary pager company email packages, special web mail forms on web pages or the purchase of a special email account from the vendor. Some companies say they have “email to pager” service when what they have is only a form on their Internet web page but no access from normal email. Paging services are a highly competitive market. If your pager service company does not have true email capability, dump them and sign up with a company that provides the service you want.

If you are having trouble sending a page from within Send Email, try using the same addresses and body text from the same machine using Outlook. If you cannot use Outlook to send a message to the desired pager, this indicates a problem with your computer’s Outlook configuration, with your Internet connectivity, or with the email to pager service. If Outlook cannot send an email to the pager, Send Email will not be able to either.

A Request from manifold.net

GIS has played a key role in the development of "direct mail" in snail mail. GIS will also play a key role, for better or for worse, in the development of sophisticated geo-targeting methods for email as well as snail mail. We'd like to ask our colleagues and customers to use Send Email only for beneficial uses and in situations where the recipient wants to be contacted. Please do not use Send Email to spam people.

Send Email can be used for many good purposes. Emergency coordinators can be notified if a storm threatens their community. Volunteer fire department members in rural areas can be paged to deal with a specific fire threat. Companies can send email to representatives or dealers within a certain drive time of a proposed new product tour. The possibilities for good are endless.

Targeted email for those who want to receive it is good. Spam is bad. Please, let us all make sure that we in the GIS community will not be the ones who ruin a good thing.

Notes

The John's Gas Stations example is fictional. Perhaps the most fictional aspect of the example is the use of email addresses for congressional representatives. Very few of the representatives have published emails for the public to use. Most hide behind a web form and do not allow direct emails.