Word 2003 mail merge to Groupwise – sending a few to wrond recipients

[vielou]

I have a Word 2003 e-mail message type document. My data source for the merge is a .csv file, from which I piked a few mergefields and from which is picked the EmailID when I merge to e-mail (Groupwise). The mail format is Plain text. All seems to work fine … except … a few emails are sent to the wrong e-mail address found in the .csv file. So one recipient gets his e-mail and someone else’s e-mail. And that someone doen’t get an e-mail since his address was swapped at some point. Does somebody know of a problem like this one?

Topic

[Support 3]

– Are you using the Personalized Emailer (http://advansyscorp.com/formativ_sol_personalized_emailer.htm) solution?
– Is your template message created in MS Word? We strongly recommend not to use the Word document as template message. MS Word uses different format which not supported in GroupWise. We recommend to use the HTML editor.
– Which version of GroupWise you are running (See GroupWise help – About GroupWise)?
– Can you re-produce this behaviour?

Regards,
Advansys Support

[vielou]

Thank you for your quick response.
– I am NOT using the Personalized Emailer solution.
– YES, my template message is created in MS Office Word 2003 (11.6502.6408) SP1. You recommend to use which HTML editor?
– We are running Novell GroupWise 7.0 (7.0.1 14/12/2006, 553).
– Yes I can re-produce this behaviour with a smaller 45 row .csv file.

[Support 3]

Could you please let us know which solution you are using or how you creating the mass mailout?

As we have said earlier, we strongly recommend against using Microsoft Word as your HTML editor. When a Word document is saved as HTML, Word includes HTML codes which make the HTML file incompatible with a GroupWise HTML message.

Regards,
Advansys Support

[vielou]

Currently, we are using the following solution, using Word 2003:
– opening up template document
– setting main document type to ‘E-mail messages’
– opening data source, .csv file
– when having a look at ‘Mail Merge Recipients’, all EmailIDs in the file look great
– then ‘Merge to E-mail’, To: EmailID, Mail format: Plain text (and not HTML), all looks fine for all records HOWEVER, some emails are sent to the wrong recipient email (2%).
(HTML Mail format won’t send a thing.)
(Attachment Mail format seems to go through ok but not necessarily want we want.)

You strongly recommend NOT using Microsoft Word … we have lots of IFs when inserting MERGEFIELDs in the template. Can you recommend another tool with which we could do the same? And is Word not compatible even if it is a plain text message we are working with?

Thank you

[Support 3]

You can try our Personalized Emailer (http://advansyscorp.com/formativ_pack_personalized_emailer.htm) to send personalized emails directly from GroupWise. Supports input from GroupWise Address Books, Address Book Groups, CSV files, ACT! and Databases (MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, Access etc.).

Formativ commercial products are provided as free, fully featured 30-day trial software. For continued use beyond the evaluation period, you need to purchase and register the product with a registration key.

Regards,
Advansys Support

[vielou]

I’ve installed and tried your 30 day trial Personalized Emailer. When trying the Personalized Emailer Field Inserter, using a CSV file, here’s what I got: Sorry, the CSV file’s structure could not be deternined. Please ensure you have specified the correct field seperator character. I did tick ‘First line contains field names’ and my separator chararcter is a ‘,’. Are there limits to the data source to be used? My file has only 45 rows of data, with 1000 fields accross. I’d like very much to have this solution work for us, but it doesn’t look too good…
Thanks for your help

[Support 3]

It appear, you may have incorrect data structure in your CSV file. CSV file usually have one row per line, each column should separated by the ‘,’ or ‘;’ character. You can choose the separator character in the Personalized Emailer solution.

Many of our customer using the CSV as data source and we use it internally. You can try to open the CSV in MS Excel, review the records then save as CSV. No hard return character should exists in column value. You can also test the solution by creating a new CSV file with couple of records from your existing CSV file.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Advansys Support

[vielou]

I have looked very closely and I really can’t see where I could have incorrect data structure in my CSV file. My CSV file does have one row per line, each column separated by the “,” character (double quotes because of single quotes ‘ found in some fields). I do choose the comma as the separator character in the Personalized Emailer solution, but no luck.

My CSV file won’t open properly in MS Excel because of the 1000 fields accross, too large. So I review my file using TextPad. There is no hard return character in column values. Wouldn’t it be possible for you to test this, if I could send you the Word and CSV test files (only 45 rows)?

The registrars office here at the college would need a solution A.S.A.P., I really would need some help.
Thank you

[Support 3]

It appear, too many columns in the CSV as the Excel also unable to open. You need to remove some columns from the CSV file. You can make a copy of the original file and remove unnecessary columns.

Sorry, we are unable to test it as the issue appear to be data related.

Regards,
Advansys Support

[vielou]

Personalized Emailer Field Inserter, using a CSV file, from which I removed a lot of columns, here’s what I got:
CMimeObjectExtractor.DoSanityChecks
C:Documents and SettingsSQuesnMy DocumentsAdvansysFormativAppletsPersonalized Emailer_Flexalock.vbf
Cannot find file
‘C:Documents and SettingsSQuesnLocal SettingsTempadvfmtmpMime.822’ at line 9394, column 7

[Support 3]

The error indicate the Personalized Emailer unable to find the Mime.822 file on the master template message. We only seen this error in some beta GroupWise client where the client failed to create the “Mime.822” file.

Our engineers recommended you to upgrade the GroupWise client to latest point release as you are running “GroupWise 7.0 (7.0.1 14/12/2006)”.

You can also try to use the Field Inserter to insert field then save the message to (CTRL+S) Work-In-Progress folder, finally use the Personalized Emailer to create the emails.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Advansys Support

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