Personalized Attachments

AY Mail 2. Any Edition
Some knowledge of file systems required

It is sometimes necessary to send different attachments to different people. If you want to do so, you need to prepare the files to be attached and and then make a data field that will be pointing to the file.

Preparing data fields:

For each customer, you need to have a data field that refers to the file name to be attached. For example, you may have a Customer Id data field. Let us assume we have three customers: John, Joe and Jill, and that they have customer IDs 123, 124 and 125 respectively.

Preparing files:

You need to put all the files that are to be sent into the same directory, for example C:\FILES. You need to name your files uniformly. Typically, the name of the file should start from prefix (you do not have to use the prefix if you do not want to) and end with postfix (which is also optional). The postfix will usually include the file extension. For example, if you are sending out billing statements, you can decide to prefix your file names with bill and use .pdf as a postfix. If we have three customers, as stated above, we have to create three files - bill123.pdf for John, bill124.pdf for Joe and bill125.pdf for Jill.

Setting up the attachment:

1. Click on the Message tab and then click on the Attachments button. The Attachments dialog will appear:

2. Click on the Add Custom button (you must have at least one data field or the button will be disabled). The Attach Custom File dialog will appear:

3. Select the directory where you put all your files under Source Directory.

4. Type in the Prefix, for example "bill."

5. Select the field that contains the IDs under Data Field.

6. Type in the Postfix, for example ".pdf."

7. Type in the general name of the file under the File Name as the Recipients will see it, for example "bill.pdf." It is very important to put a correct extension in here, because this determines file type. A wrong extension will make the file unreadable. Leave that blank if you want real file names to be used.

8. Click on the OK button, then close the Attachments dialog as well.

You are ready to send your bills out.