Maintain recipient lists

There are two different ways to maintain recipient lists with AY Mail:

1. You can use AY Mail as a storage for your data. This will let you handle subscriptions/unsubscriptions, track delivery status. This approach will be more beneficial for newsletters, mailing lists, or targeted advertizing campains.

In this case, AY Mail stores recipient lists inside projects. The lists are always ordered alphabetically by email addresses. It is impossible to have duplicate email addresses on the list, so you do not have to worry about duplicates. Besides email addresses themselves, AY Mail maintains the status of the email address (such as successful or undeliverable) and the date when the address was added to the list. You can also add additional Data Fields to store information such as names, addresses, customer ids, or anything you think is worth maintaining.

2. [Professional and Corporate Editions Only] If you already have your lists maintained in a database, it is probably the best way to continue maintaining your database. You then can create a project linked to your database, and AY Mail will automatically obtain the recipient list from your database every time you are send a message. This approach will be more beneficial for shared customer or client databases.

Storing Recipient Lists with AY Mail

AY Mail internal storage lets you do the following operations:

1. Import addresses from different Sources to add new addresses to your list.

2. Edit your list data. You can do that either on the Recipients Tab or you can do a search with the Recipients->Simple Search or Recipients->Advanced Search menu command and then edit the recipients data in the search results directly.

3. Verify Addresses to make sure that you do not have undeliverable addresses on your list.

4. Maintain a deliverability status that lets you know if the message failed, was opened, or clicked through. You can disable or delete addresses based on the deliverabilty status using the Recipients->Disable Undeliverables menu command. The current status of the recipient is always displayed as an icon left to the recipients address.

5. Combine lists from different projects. You can either add or subtract lists. See the description of the Combine dialog for details.

6. [Professional and Corporate Editions Only] Collect subscription and unsubscription requests to let your subscribers decide whether they want to stay on your list or not.

7. [Professional and Corporate Editions Only] Export the lists in CSV formats using the File->Export->Recipients Listmenu command.

Using Projects Linked to your own Database

[Professional and Corporate Editions Only]
In this case you will have to perform all the maintenace operations inside your database. AY Mail will only pull the list of recipients from the database every time it sends.

This means that you can use your existing database and simply link AY Mail to it.

You can use groups to restrict your mailing to a part of the database. And you can use all the data fields from your database for mail merge and message personalization.

You do not necessarily need to use a database - you can use files, mail folders, address books - the full list of suitable sources can be found here.

After you do a mailing, you can export the report, which will create a CSV file with all the status and click through information. You can use this file to put this information back to your database.

See also Links to External Databases.