Comments by MikeAngel (Top 4 by date)

I'd like to do it programmatically using VB .NET 2010. I'd like to start with a form containing a field I can paste a Word doc into. The field has to look exactly like the Word doc including any graphic elements. When I click run, it needs to pick up the first 200 email addresses in an Excel file and mail them out individually. When received the message should look just like the Word doc. I'm mostly interested in code to perform the email specific functionality. I know how to get the addresses from the Excel file.

The program I wrote started as the Bulk Email Sender & Extractor by Amir Pournasserian, which I obtained right here at Code Project. It required a lot of work to get it to fit my requirements. I actually lost the code because the drive containing became unreadable. I just did another search and it is still the only one in the result list and it was written in 2004. Any ideas? I'm working in VB .NET 2010.

Four times a month we send a program alert to about 850 people who are interested in our programs. We have a specific format for the message including a logo. I create a bunch of email drafts in WLM with me as the main recipient. I pull up each draft and paste 50 addresses into the BCC and then click send. I recently pasted the addresses into the CC by mistake and realized it after looking at my own email receipts. One of the recipients replied with a complaint adding that he did not want his email address exposed to the other recipients of the message. We apologized. I would like to try to avoid that by programmatically pasting into the BCC to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

I had written a .NET app in the past to do the mailing but it was quite problematic. I used a rich text box to paste in the message but I was only able to use an HTML format and it was quite a pain trying to make sure it was formatted correctly. I had to create an HTML formatting function and it became quite complex in order to handle all the possibilites. Now I paste the message from a Word doc into a WLM draft and it's done. So if I could programmatically use WLM to pull up an exist draft and designate the BCC to be the next 50 addresses and tell it to send, we would never expose an email address ever again.

The other issue is that our Internet hosting service won't allow us to send more than 200 messages per hour without significantly increasing what they charge us and this restriction forces us to do it with 5 separate mailings.

Mike