Mass Emailing Ideas

[skicamel]

Essentially, what I'm going for is an automated mass emailing done daily. I've got the scripts that pull all of the customer information. I've created mail templates in Crystal & Excel to manually send these, but I've been told I need this to be completely automated... today. I typically try to find an answer myself before posting here, but with this deadline (and I know deadlines are foreign to most of you ;-) ), I thought I'd post now and research in the meantime.

I'm looking for any ideas on automating these mass mailings. Whether this can be done strictly thorough SQL w/ say, DTS, xpsendmail, and a cursor, or if I'm bound to go elsewhere and try to automate something out of these other programs.

Any input at all would be greatly appreciated.

 

[JayKusch]

Here may be a few steps to get your project rolling. i have used this to email merchants their passwords and other pertinat info in a form email.

1. create a table in sql to hold your customer data fields
2. create a DTS package to pull the data into the predefined table(s)
3. create a sql job that executes the DTS package and have it run when you want it to. daily, hourly or sooner.
4. in that job, after the import, create a stored procedure that queries the table(s) you just imported into and then create your email body in the store procedure,(sp), and then fire it off using xp_sendmail.
5. you may need to use a cursor to go through all the customers that you have imported data for. of course you will need to flag these records once they have been emailed so that they are not sent again.

Hope this helps!


Thanks

J. Kusch

 

[skicamel]

Thanks for the help. Looks like a cursor w/ xp_sendmail is going to work beautifully.

Good day, all!