Doc How to Prepare and Distribute Any Correspondence

  1. Goto Component –> CiviCRM –> CiviCRM Home
  2. From the CiviCRM menu on the left panel, select CiviMail
  3. Click “New Mailing” button and follow the following five steps
  4. Step 1. Select Recipients:
    * Name the mailing list, eg: “2011-03 Technical Meeting”
    * Include Group(s): Mailing List Group and FESAus Member, then click Next
  5. Step 2. Track and Respond:
    * Select “Track Click-Throughs?” and “Track Opens?”
    * Unselect “Forward Replies?”
    * Leave everything else as default
  6. Step 3. Mailing Content:
    * Leave From Email Address as “no-reply@fesaus.org”
    * Enter Mailing Subject, (eg: March 2011 FESAus Technical Meeting by Colin McPhee)
    * Compose the HTML message as follows:
    — Start with “Dear {contact.first_name} {contact.last_name},“
    — Type content of newsletter. It is recommended to pre-prepared the content and copy and paste it here.
    — If applicable, insert hyperlink to “Online Registration” to the content, so email receipients can click the registration link to go straight to fesaus website registration section.
    — end with “{domain.address}“. This is a mandatory field in the newsletter
  7. Step 4. Test
    * It’s good practice to send a test message first. Enter an email address at “Send to This Address” field, and click Send a Test Mailing
  8. Step 5. Schedule or Send
    * Select “Send Immediately”, then click “Submit Mailing”.
  9. The email message is now queued for sending. At every hour, 200 emails will be sent out to the recipients. If there are 550 emails in the recipient group, it may take up to 3 hours to distribute the newsletter to all recipients.
  10. Go back to the CiviMail and select “Report” for the newletter that has been queued, to see the status of the email distribution. A successful distribution will show the same number between Intended Recipients and Succesful Deliveries or 100%.

The Newsletter can be created and saved, without going through the complete steps for distribution.

A newsletter can also be “re-used”, in which case, existing setup can be used without starting from scratch. When reusing existing newsletter, it is possible to change the recipients, edit the newsletter text, etc.

Technical info:

  • At Hostmonster, CRON job is setup to run every one hour to check if there’s any queued email message. If there’s any queued message, it will take up to 200 emails and sent it out. It will repeat the process every hours until no queued email message left in the system
  • To view or edit the CRON job, go to cPanel of HostMonster and select CRON Jobs in the Advanced section.
  • To change the maximum number of email to send every hour, go to back end of Joomla, select CiviCRM –> Administer CiviCRM –> CiviMail –> Mailer Settings. Currently at the time of writing, the Mailer Batch Limit is set at 200.

Please treat this information confidentially, particularly your user id and password for FESAus website administration.
Written by Kamal Jansen on 20-Feb-2011
 

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