Sending newsletters
With Group-Office you can send a newsletter by e-mail or your favourite text editor like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.Org for regular mail.
Note: if you want to send a newsletter to all your contacts you don't have to use the "Add newsletter" function. You can simply add a report without any search conditions.
You can create a newsletter group with the Reports module. You also require the extra fields module. The newsletter function will create a report and a custom field. The report searches for all contacts that have the custom field checkbox with the newsletter name checked.
Click on "Add newsletter" and fill in a name.
Adding contacts to the group
After adding the newsletter group it's empty. In most cases you already have a lot of contacts that you want to add to the group. Open the addessbook module. Use CTRL and SHIFT to select multiple contacts that you want to add and then click on the "Edit selected" button. Set the newsletter group to selected and press "Ok". The contacts will be updated and the newsletter report will show them.
Sending an e-mail newsletter
The report can be used to send an e-mail newsletter. This works great together with the template system. You can send personalized messages that start with "Dear Mr. Smith" for example.
To send an e-mail newsletter go to:
Reports -> Double click the report -> E-mailing
The regular e-mail composer will open and you can send out your e-mailing.
Sending a newsletter for regular mail
If you want to send a newsletter by regular mail you need to do this with your text editor. The report can be optimized for your text editor so that the data field names match exactly. The reports module has the field schemes for OpenOffice.Org and Microsoft Word built in. If you use another text editor you need to manually match the columns.
To optimize the fields go to:
Reports -> Double click the report -> Properties -> Fields
Click on Optimize for OpenOffice.org/Microsoft Word to set the fields.
Now the columns headers are set in the way the text editor expects them to be.
Click on Ok to return to the report results and click on "Export".
Save the file to your computer and launch your text editor.
Consult your text editor documentation on how to merge a document and to use this Comma Seperated File as the database.