Level III Feature

The Vendor Database (in the Level III program) includes a module which allows you send emails to some or all of your vendors.  It is reached by selecting TOOLS >> SEND EMAILS TO SELECTED OR ALL VENDORS. The following screen appears:

More information on using the Vendor Emailing Module is found below:

Selecting Vendors

You can select which names you want on the mailing list by clicking and placing a checkmark in the "Yes" column.   By clicking again, you can remove the checkmark.  You may also use the spacebar to check or uncheck the "Yes" column.

To select a group of vendors click on the first of the group.  Make sure a checkmark is beside the first member of the group.  Hold down the SHIFT key and select the last member of the group.  All the vendors between the two will be selected.  You can de-select a group by doing the same thing, but in this case, the first member of the group should not have a checkmark beside it.

You can move up and down on the spreadsheet by using the arrow keys, PageUp or PageDown on your keyboard.  You can also use the up and down VCR buttons on the lower right of the screen.

You can search for a name (or address or other field) by clicking the "Search" button.

To find out how many purchase orders that you've selected, click on "Check Count."

To automatically select all of the vendors, click the "Select All" button.  To remove all selected vendors, click the "De-select All" button.

Remove Duplicate (and Empty) Email Addresses

To assure that only one email goes to one vendor, click on the "Remove Duplicate Emails" button.  This will remove the checkmarks from all duplicate email addresses.  It also removes the checkmark from any vendors that does not have an email address.

Prepare / Send Email Message

Before using the Send Mail process, if you haven't already, you'll need to get your program set-up to use the email features.  That's done in Basic Program Set-up.  You'll want to make sure that you have a non-web based email account as described in Basic Program Set-up, and you'll need an account which provides you with enough daily capacity to send out emails to all vendors on the mailing list.

If you have a large number of vendors, it's a not a good idea to use your primary business email address for bulk emailing.  You'll end up getting lots of bounced emails and that will really clutter up your primary email inbox.  Use another email address for bulk mailings.

Before beginning the email process, you'll want to create the mailing list.  Follow the steps described above so that you end up with a list of selected vendors.

If you are on a network, it's a good idea to do mailings when usage of AnyPO is light or non-existent.  Because of the time involved, large mailings are best done at the end of the day.

To begin the email process click on the "Prepare / Send Email Message" button. A dialog box will appear that allows you to compose a message.  The message will be saved.  If you get started preparing it, and must return to it later, your work will be retained.

You can insert the company or individual's name in the subject line or message by using the [NAME] substitution variable.   For example if you wrote "Greetings [NAME]!"  and the individual's name is Bill Wilson, the end result would be "Greetings Bill Wilson!."

You can also add one or more attachments to each of the emails going out.  To do so, click on the "Browse" button and select the attachments.

When the message is ready, click on the "Start Sending" button.

Before the sending process begins, one last dialog box will appear: "Store Information on This Mailing."  This allows you to keep a record of the mailing.  Enter a short descriptive title for the mailing.  It's optional but you can also enter more detailed information about the mailing.  Along with the information that you enter, AnyPO will also save the date and time of the mailing and the number of addresses you have selected for the mailing

After you enter the title of the mailing, the sending process begins.  You'll see a mailing form appear with the name of the vendor as each email is sent.  The amount of time required to send emails is dependent upon connection speeds, but you can figure an average of 12 minutes per 100 emails.  That means that 1,000 emails would take approximately 2 hours.

Because of the length of time involved, it's best to do bulk emailings at the end of the day or in the evening.

When the process is complete AnyPO will trigger a message and indicate how many emails have been sent.  That doesn't mean that all emails will get through.  It's very likely that you will have bounced emails.  You'll be able to take care of those with the "Remove Invalid Email" function (below).

(Also, AnyPO will specifically list any emails that are missing the "@" character.  You probably won't have many, if any, of these.  But if you do, you'll want to do a search for them in your purchase order file and remove or correct the address.)

Show Un-sent Emails

Sending emails is not always a perfect process.  The email server may go down.  You may have a glitch with your Internet connection.  Your hourly or daily limit may be reached.  When something like that happens, everything stops, and you'll need to begin again in some manner.  But you wouldn't want to start all over and re-send the same emails to those that have already received them.

That's where the "Show Un-sent Emails" function comes in handy.  It's used after you do a mailing.  It's a good idea to click on this button after every bulk emailing - just in case.

When you click on the "Show Un-sent Emails" button, a message will appear telling you how many emails have NOT been sent.  If it says zero (0), then you don't have to worry about it.  But if you have anything over zero (0), then you'll want to continue with the process by clicking the "Yes" button when asked "Would you like to continue and view the list?"

At this point, AnyPO will run through your list, removing the checkmarks from emails that have been sent and leaving checkmarks beside emails that have not been sent.

With the un-sent emails selected, it's just a matter of re-running the Bulk Email application.   Click on the "Prepare / Send Email Message" button to to start the process.  You'll see that your original email message  have been saved.  Continue by clicking the "Start Sending" button.  If you run into another snag and not all of this batch of emails are sent, you can repeat this process again.  You can repeat it as many time necessary to get your bulk email sent off to all of your vendors.

Note that this list does not include bounced emails.  (Bounced emails will be taken care of next.)  It only lists unsent emails - those that were prevented from being sent because of a server or program problem.  Also note that this list is saved temporarily.  The list will be re-built if you use the bulk email function again.

Remove Invalid Emails

Invariably, you'll end up with bounced emails.  Soon after the bulk email is sent, you'll find a batch of bounced emails in your mail inbox, and you'll get more over the next couple of days.

Since these are bad email addresses, you'll want to remove them from your purchase orders.  This feature, reached by clicking the "Remove Invalid Emails" button enables you to do that.

It highly recommended that you use this feature.  Getting rid of invalid addresses greatly speeds up the processing time next time you do a bulk emailing.  If you don't use it, the numbers of bounced email will continue to  build up, and it will become more and more difficult to do away with them as time goes on.

You do not have to run this process right after a bulk mailing.  You can run this process at any time.  You could, for example, come back to it a couple of weeks later.

The way this process works is that you'll provide AnyPO with a list of invalid emails.  AnyPO will take the first invalid email address, find it, and remove it.  It continues doing this until it finds all instances of the same email address.  Then it looks for the next email address on the list and repeats the process.  You can see that this involves a lot of searching and replacing, so you'll want to give this process time to run.

The key to using this process is preparing a list of bad email address.  There's a type of software program you can use to make preparing the list relatively painless.  The type of software is known as a clipboard extender or a clipboard manager.  Clipboard Magic is one example and it's a free program.  Clipmate is another example.  It does cost ($35), but it's the one we use, and we're sure that you'll find it incredibly useful for this and other tasks.

Once you have Clipboard Magic or Clipmate installed.  Here are the steps you'll want to take:

1. To make the list, open your email inbox and start going through the bounced emails.

2. Copy the each bad email address to the clipboard.  Clipboard Magic or Clipmate will remember each copied email address.

3. When you are finished, open up a spreadsheet program.  You'll be pasting the email addresses in the first column of the spreadsheet, starting at the top row.  Both Clipboard Magic and Clipmate have a "Series Paste" or "Power Paste" feature.  When you turn on Series Paste, you'll be able to paste each of the email address onto the spreadsheet.  You can create a list of bad emails in very little time.  By using the copy and series paste technique, you are able to copy the exact spelling and format of the bad email address.

4. Once you get the email addresses copied to the first column.  Save the spreadsheet as a "TAB DELIMITED" file.  Save it with a name like Bad_Emails.txt.  Place the file in the My_Files sub-directory of the AnyPO directory.  If AnyPO is installed to C:\AnyPO, you'll place it in C:\AnyPO\My_Files.  If AnyPO is installed to C:\Program Files, you'll place it in C:\Program Files\AnyPO\My_Files.

5. Click on the the "Remove Invalid Emails" button.  A dialog box appears briefly describing the information  above.  Enter the name of the file, i.e. "Bad_Email.txt." Then click on "Start Process."

AnyPO will remove the bad address.  As mentioned above, AnyPO has to do a lot searching and replacing, and you'll need to allow time for the process to run.

If you have correct email addresses for some of these vendors, run the above process first to clean out the bad addresses.  Then you can add the correct addresses.  You can do that from the Main Purchase Order Screen.  Use the search feature to find the vendor and type in the new email address.   You only need to add the corrected email address to one purchase order.

Information on Past Mailings

Whenever you do a mailing, AnyPO will trigger a dialog box that allows you to enter a title for your mailing. You can optionally include more descriptive information.  Along with your information, AnyPO will include the date and time of the mailing and the number of vendors selected.

You can view this information by clicking on the "Information on Past Mailings" button.  The "Information on Past Mailing" dialog box appears.