Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Emailing system is running great...except

Things are humming along nicely.

I'm able to specify a list of web pages on which there are email addresses for people whom I believe will be interested in hearing about what I'm selling. Then I run a macro that views each page, parses from them the valid email addresses, compares those addresses to those already in my list, and if they are not in the list, adds them to the bottom of the list. Once I've gathered the email addresses, I can programmatically send each one an HTML formatted email, and mark the date and time of each sent email. Finally, when I receive any bad email bounce back messages or "remove me" replied, I can programmatically find the email addresses in the list and mark them as either "bad" or "removed", so that messages are no longer sent to those addresses.

Things I still need to do is make it easier to load a customized HTML email message -- sort of like building a library of messages, which I can programmatically specify. Right now I edit the HTML code each time I want a slightly different email message.

Also, I still haven't heard back from the guy who wrote Outlook Redemption, so I'll have to try to figure out on my own how to specify a particular email account from which to send emails, so that they don't accidentally "spill over" into my Gmail account, even though it's not the default account set in Outlook.

Another thing I'll do is add a macro to automatically mark email addresses with date and time stamps for positive reactions to the message -- i.e. views of certain web pages, requests for more info, etc.

It's getting pretty slick. Stay tuned...

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