MaxBulk Mailer is a full-featured mail-merge tool for both Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X on the Apple Macintosh which allows you to send personalised announcements, press releases, prices lists or any kind of email message as either plain text or HTML documents. MaxBulk Mailer is fast, fully customizable, very easy to use, as well as been inexpensive.
The system requirements for MaxBulk Mailer are quite reasonable;
- MacOS 8.6 or Higher, including Mac OS X
- PowerPC Computer
- 32 MB of RAM
- 800×600 resolution, thousands of colors
- 10 Mb of hard drive space
Composing Your Message
When you first launch MaxBulk Mailer, you are up in the Message screen, which you can commence typing your message, just like a normal email client.
You have a Subject field where you can place a brief summary of what your message is about. It is recommended that you keep the Subject to 40 characters or less.
MaxBulk Mailer also supplies a number predefined prefixes that you can in your subject to help your recipients identify the type message you are sending.
If you want to you can also spice up your messages by sending it styled text or HTML, with styles like Bold, Underline, larger font size, or a different font colour.
There are a couple of things to be very aware of when sending styled or HTML email. First, they increase the size of the actual email; Second, not every one can read them; and most importantly, a lot of people do not like receiving HTML formatted email. They believe you should send a brief and to the point plain text message and if you need fancy graphics and the like, then provide a link in the email to your website and place the nicely formatted document up there.
Maxbulk Mailer also supports the inclusion of attachments or enclosures, so you can add a Microsoft Word, Acrobat PDF or any type of document to your mail out.
Again, be aware of some of the down sides of including attachments.
Obviously they increase the size of the message, both for you to send and for the recipients to receive. Remember not everyone lives at the end of a broadband connection and the number of 56k or even slower modems still in use is quite high.
Be sure that people can open the attachment at the other end. Not everyone owns Microsoft Word, and as you probably know, not everyone runs Microsoft Windows. Adobe PDF is a good format for sending documents. It is a free download, runs on a variety of Operating Systems, and virtually any document can be converted to it.
Also be extremely aware of the increased risk of sending a virus infection when sending attachments. If you insist on sending an attachment, make sure it is virus-free. Apart from making sure you have up to day anti-virus software installed and running, sending the attachment as PDF is a good way to help ensure it is virus free.
Again, rather than including an attachment in your email, you may want to consider placing it one a web server and including a link in the email message to it. Besides, if you know how to access your web server logs, you can also workout who reads the attachment and other useful information.
While it nice to see that MaxBulk Mailer has all these nice formatting options, the feature that sets MaxBulk Mailer above a normal email client like Eudora or Outlook Express, for email marketing purposes is its’ personalisation options.
These personalisation options are accessed through the Tags menu.
The Standard version of MaxBulk Mailer gives you some fairly basic tags like Fullname, Firstname, Surname, Company, Email Address and a couple of date formats, while the Pro versions gives you all of these, plus more date and time options, as well ten customisable tags that you can assign to anything you like, depending on the type of message you sending.
If you wanted to use MaxBulk Mailer to send reminder notices of when an annual membership was due you could assign a unique customer code or ID, a due date for membership renewal, and the amount due. The uses are unlimited.
You can even write complex expressions to determine what is displayed, like If [Gender] equals “F” then use “Mrs”.
The feature that sets MaxBulk Mailer above a normal email client is its’ personalisation options
Recipients
The next tab on the MaxBulk Mailer is the Recipients section and obviously this is the area when you add the recipients you wish to send a personalised email.
You can either manually enter the data straight in to Maxbulk Mailer, or more than likely, you’ll import it from another database application like FileMaker Pro.
The next tab on the MaxBulk Mailer is the Recipients section and obviously this is the area when you add the recipients you wish to send a personalised email.
You can either manually enter the data straight in to Maxbulk Mailer, or more than likely, you’ll import it from another database application like FileMaker Pro.
The records initially show the Firstname, Surname and Email fields, as well as indicating if the recipient is to be included in the mailout or not. If you click on the triangle, it will display any other fields you may have defined like Company or the Optional Fields.
To enter data yourself, you simply enter the details in the box at the base of the screen and click the Add button (or just press Enter on the keyboard).
To import data from another database application, you may need to export it to common database format like Tab-delimited or Comma-Delimited text. I understand that there may be a way to import directly from a FileMaker Pro database, but I haven’t investigated that for myself yet.
Once you have the data in a format MaxBulk Mailer can handle, you simply click on the Import button, select the data file from the dialog and select Open. You’ll then be presented with a screen showing all the fields included in the data file. You can use the Field Delimiter pop-up menu to choose the right format and to preview the actual data you can use the left and right arrows in the top left corner to scroll through each record.
The chances are that your database field order won’t correspond with the field order required by Maxbulk Mailer. No worries, just highlight a field and use the up and down arrows on the right hand side of the screen until it matches the correct field and repeat as often as required.
Once all the fields are aligned, click the Import button and your data should be imported ready for addressing and personalising your email.
If you need to you can also Export data from MaxBulk Mailer so it can be used in other applications as well.
If you have a couple of frequently used lists, such as a test back to yourself, or to Management, you can save those lists and they are readily accessible to you under the pop-up menu in the top left of the Recipients screen. There is a default entry that sends a test back to the support team at MaxProg and I strongly suggest you set up a test list back to just yourself so you can test the message before sending out to your entire list.
I strongly suggest you set up a test list back to just yourself so you can test the message before sending out to your entire list
Settings
The third tab, Settings, is actually the section you’ll probably want to use first and is where you enable many of the sending options.
There a few settings that required to be set in order to MaxBulk Mailer to be able to send and these are highlight with pale red text entry boxes. Essentially they identify who you are and where to despatch the messages to.
The Account ID needs to be a valid account that the SMTP (outbound email) server recognises and the SMTP needs to be accessible from your ISP and in fact is normally your ISP’s STMP server you use in your normal email client. The From field also needs to be a valid email address that the SMTP server can process mail for. These requirements are standard with most SMTP servers to prevent spaming.
The Authentication option is sometimes required by ISP’s before you can access their SMTP servers and some anti-spam applications and filters also look for an Authentication header to determine that it a legitimate email.
MaxBulk Mailer v2.5 introduced a configurable number of simultaneous connections it can make to a SMTP server. With a fast internet connection this can speed up mail delivery quite significantly, but with a modem connection, you should keep it to one or two connections. You should also double check your agreement with your ISP as to how many SMTP connections you can have at once.
ISP’s sometimes also limit the number of email addresses that can be sent in any one connection to the SMTP server, so you can use the Group Mails option to specify how many messages it will send in each connection. The higher the number, the quicker it can be, but the more likely you’re ISP will see your mail as possible spam.
If you don’t use the personalisation options of MaxBulk Mailer, you are missing out on one of its’ most powerful features. However, you can speed up processing and sending of messages that aren’t personalised by un-selecting the Activate tags processing option.
The signature works like any email client signature – it places a piece of standard text at the footer of each email. I recommend you consider using it to indicate how people can unsubscribe from future email… and then ensure you remove them from your list. It is also worth considering reminding people of why they are on your list and/or how they subscribed to it, particularly if you only use it once a month or less.
Using the pop-up menu at the top of the screen, you can also save your settings for later retrieval as well as having different settings for things like the From fields for use with different departments. eg: you can have different From, Name, and Signatures for the sales and accounts departments.
Consider using the Signature to indicate how people can unsubscribe from future email… and then ensure you remove them from your list
Preferences
While you are configuring your settings, you might as set your global preferences as well. These can be accessed from the “Application” menu under Mac OS X or from the “Edit” menu under Mac OS 8/9. Alternatively, you can click on the little “preference” icon in the top left most corner of the settings screen.
The tab for your preferences is Encoding and this determines way your email looks when editing and the language encoding used when sending.
The second tab is where you can elect to configure the names of the ten optional tags. By default they are called [Opt1] through to [Opt10], but as you can see these aren’t exactly the most descriptive names. So, just change them to something that will make more sense like [Address] or [Suburb].
Note these changes are global and will affect all future messages. However, they will appear as such in the Tags menu on the compose screen.
The next tab has a few miscellaneous preferences.
In the recipients import section you can get MaxBulk to automatically change the case of each record imported so that the first letter of the Firstname and Surname are capital letters and the rest are lower case. By default this is on, but if you are importing from a known database set though, it is useful to turn it off as it can change what you have typed in your database. eg, it will change “Stuart McLaren” to “Stuart Mclaren”. While this might not be important to you or me, but may be to Stuart, as his name is spelt with a capital L.
One very useful feature is the check for duplicate entries. If enabled it will only import one single instance of an email address – thus saving sending multiple copies of your email to that person.
You can now have an Delivery Report sent back via email (see the section “After You’ve Sent Your Message” for more information on this)
You can also have MaxBulk Mailer save a copy of the connection log and the recipients list, so you can access them again next time you launch MaxBulk Mailer.
The last tab enables to add some X-Headers to your messages. X-Headers are optional fields that appear in all that “jargon” at the beginning of an email.
Many people include an Organisation X-Header and sometimes in the Comments X-Headers information on how to un-subscribe can be included.
Previewing Your Message
The third tab on the main MaxBulk Mailer screen allows you to preview what your message will look like once the personalised data has been merged into the document and the Signature added. You check each individual record by using the left and right arrows in the top left of the screen.
The thin grey line running down the screen is called a “Philips Bar” and shows where the 72nd column is located. This has historical reasons dating back to days when all email was plain text and expected to fit on a 80 column by 24 (or 25) line screen. To make email that had been forwarded easy to read when the quoting character, usually a <, was added to each line, it was customary to limit the length of each line to 72 characters to allow for this. Today, some email clients still expect this, and not everyone uses a Graphic User Interface, so to be 100% compatible, it often recommended that you still conform to this standard. However, in my experience this isn't really necessary.
[caption id="attachment_719" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Preview Screen[/caption]
If you have used style text and/or HTML in your message, you can also preview the merged document in a web browser.
The best way of proofing an email is to send a test to yourself first and looking at it in a variety of email clients and if possible on both a Mac and PC.
Sending Your Message
Once you have written and then previewed your message, you’ll be ready to send you message. Strangely enough, the option actually sending is on the final tab, which is strangely called Log, rather than send.
Anyway, there are two ways to send your message – Immediately or Scheduled for a later time.
If you choose Schedule, you need to go to the Mail menu and select Schedule…, where you get a dialogue box asking you for the date and time you wish the message to commence sending.
Scheduling can be useful if you want to have the email go out during a quite time for your network, like at 2am, so it doesn’t impact on your other internet tasks like web browsing and email, but your machine will need to be on, running Maxbulk Mailer and connected to the internet at the scheduled time in order for this to work.
When you click Send (or OK from the Scheduler) you’ll probably get a dialogue box warning you that your text is greater than 72 characters wide and to re-warp your text – this is due to the Philips Bar discussed above. Just click Send Anyway.
BTW: While you can hold down the Command key while click send to bypass this check, I wish there was a preference to turn the warning off, or at least to change the default to “Send Anyway”.
MaxBulk Mailer will now commence sending your messages and it displays a log of what it is doing while sending and depending on how you configured your settings, it will send one at a time or a batch of them together. Either way, you’ll get to see it communicate with your SMTP server and the responses it gets back.
As to how long it will take is like asking how long a piece of string is. It depends on what settings you have enabled, how many messages you are sending, if you have any attachments or styled text and how fast your connection to the internet is, but on a 56k modem you should expect to send at 10-20 message a minute if they are plain text and no more than a page of text.
After You’ve Sent Your Message
Once MaxBulk Mailer has finished sending your message, it will up date the recipients list to show you which ones where sent and which it received errors on while sending.
If you enabled it in your Preferences, you’ll also receive a delivery report summary back via email, showing you how many messages you sent, how many were successful and how many failed. The failures are based on those that the SMTP rejected immediately, often because the recipient’s domain name didn’t exist. It doesn’t include bounces – those where the user didn’t exist or had a full mail box. You’ll get this back as separate email over the period of a few days.
Purchasing MaxBulk Mailer
There are a few different options for purchasing MaxBulk Mailer.
First, decide which Operating System you want;
- Mac OS X
- Mac OS 9
Next, decide on the language you want;
- English
- French
- German
- Italian
- Spanish
Now, you can download the appropriate version, which ships with a 30-day demonstration licence – All the features of the Standard Licence are there and fully functional, but a footer is added to each message sent out saying it was sent by an unregistered version of MaxBulk Mailer.
The file is about 1.2meg regardless of OS and language.
download »
Finally, decide on the feature set you need and purchase the appropriate licence;
- Standard
- Pro
The Standard version costs US$34.90, while the Pro version costs US$44.90.
If you purchase the Standard version, but later decide you need the extra features found in the Pro version, you can purchase an upgrade for US$12.50.
A variety of site licences are also available.
purchase »
Other MaxProg Tools
When you download MaxBulk Mailer, there demo versions of a couple of other useful email tools from MaxProg – namely eMail Extractor and eMail Bounce Handler.
eMail Extractor
eMail Extractor is a great tool for gathering email addresses out of other documents, especially the mailbox of your email client.
It is incredibly easy to use – just drag and drop a text file, a series of text files, or even an entire folder on to the Email Extractor and it commences scanning the file(s) for valid email addresses, while removing all duplicate records and then places them in a neatly formatted text file, with a single email address per line, on your desktop, ready to be simply imported in to a email client.
eMail Extractor also has simple, yet incredibly useful, preferences.
You can get it to try and extract the person’s name that is associated with the email address.
There are two options to help define what are “bad” email addresses. Be careful, with these – while in the majority of cases addresses meeting this criteria are invalid, sometimes they may actually be valid.
Under the Files section, the first option allows you to produce one single text of the valid email addresses if you originally selected multiple files to be processed. If this option is off, which it is by default, then you’ll get one file for each of the original files.
The other two options tells eMail Extractor to produce extra “error” files that show which records were duplicated or which were considered “bad”.
The demo version of eMail Extractor only processes the first 100 email addresses, but for US$14.90 you can purchase the full version, which has no limits on the number the of email processed.
Be careful how and where you “harvest” email addresses. See the section on No Spam! for more information on this topic.
eMail Bounce Handler
I’m yet to use eMail Bounce Handler myself as I have reasonably “clean” lists, but from what I can see of the documentation it seems to be a great tool for helping determine which addresses are totally wrong because the recipient has switched ISP’s or you have a typo and those addresses that have a temporary problem, like a full mailbox.
Perhaps, I’ll look in to this application at a later date, but in the mean time here is what the documentation says about its’ features:
Bounce e-mail (sometimes referred to as bounce mail) is electronic mail that is returned to the sender because it cannot be delivered for some reason. Unless otherwise arranged, bounce e-mail usually appears as a new note in your inbox. E-mail users can encounter bounce e-mail because an addressee has changed his or her address, because their mail box is full, because the note is misaddressed, or for some other reason.
Bounce e-mail can be handled by a program when sending e-mail to a list and most e-mail distribution list vendors include this capability. Such a bounce handler can retry later, unsubscribe the addressee from the list, or take some other action.
Maxprog has developed eMail Bounce Handler, a bounce e-mail filtering and handling tool that recognizes bounce e-mails using a customizable set of rules and extracts the recipients addresses allowing you to use them again to try sending your mail or to take them off your list. eMail Bounce Handler simply connects to your pop mailbox in order to retrieve bounces letting any other message untouched. Once your mailbox is processed and all bounces removed from your server, you will get your list of “bad” e-mails addresses. Then you can export it in order to clean your original list or to try to send your mail again. If you use Maxprog Bulk Mailer*, you can name your file “Delete” and then drop it over MaxBulk Mailer recipient list . All addresses from the file will be removed from the list in a snap!
eMail Bounce Handler key Features:
- Multiple customizable POP accounts.
- Scheduled connections support.
- Customizable filtering rules.
- 14 rules already defined to handle almost 90% bounces.
- Customizable deletion mark.
- Export function.
- Complete connection log.
No Spam!
Email is an extremely powerful marketing tool for business and organisations to communicate quickly and cheaply and MaxBulk Emailer makes the task to send multiple, and personalised, email even simpler. However, if used incorrectly, bulk email “spaming” can actually have a negative effect and turn customers and clients away for your organisation.
In fact, in many places, including Australia, it is illegal to send certain types of “Unsoliticted Bulk Email” (UBE), but don’t let that deter you from conducting legitimate email marketing campaigns.
Also, while there are a number of “anti-spaming” activists and organisations out there, these same groups will often also provide practical advice on how to actually perform an email marketing campaign without breaking the law, nor upsetting your client based.
For Australian’s, CAUBE.AU – The Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk Email, Australia, has an entire section on their web site devoted to information for businessesinvolved in email marketing that covers your legal responsibilities, how to avoid been labelled as a spamer, and how to actually obtain permission for your first email broadcast.
They also provide some good definitions on just what spam is and how to decide how many messages is bulk.
CAUBE.AU
CAUBE.AU – Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk Email, Australia
CAUBE.AU was formed to represent the views of those in Australia who are opposed to the advertising practices which are collectively known as email spam. CAUBE.AU is an all-volunteer grassroots organisation dedicated to eliminating spam from electronic mail boxes, with a focus on Australia’s role in preventing spam. They pursue these aims through community education programs, by providing a website site, which is a central repository for information on spam in Australia, and by providing advice to the government on how best to deal with the spam problem.
Consider joining CAUBE.AU – It’s free. And if you become an email marketer, you may also wish to take advantage of their “Merchant Logo” program, which is open to any organisation that requests email addresses, most notably any organisation that collects such addresses via a web page. Use of the merchant logo requires that the merchant agree to the terms of the merchant program and requires that the merchant comply with its requirements.
International Groups
There are plenty of anti-spam groups around the world, including;

Spam Recycling Center
The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercil Email has groups in many regions worldwide, including;

EuroCAUCE

CAUCE India
If you are located outside Australia, I still recommend you check out the CAUBE.AU site, as I have found it to be the most even handed “anti-spam” organisation by providing advice to both the recipient of spam and the sender of legitimate email marketing.
visit caube.au »
Credits
AUSOM thanks MaxProg for providing us with a registered copy of MaxBulk Mailer for use with our announcements.
All screenshots in this article were taken using Ambrosia Software’s SnapzProX. For more information on SnapzProX visit http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/utilities/snapzprox.
A copy of this article, with colour images, is available from my website, https://www.nicholaspyers.com.
Interested in reprinting this article? Any non-profit Apple Macintosh User Group (MUG) may re-print, free of charge, any of the articles written by Nicholas Pyers found at https://www.nicholaspyers.com/articles. There are just a couple of conditions, which basically boil down to letting us know – for the full terms and conditions, please visit https://www.nicholaspyers.com/reprints.