Define Recipients: Select Recipients from a Database or LDAP Directory

The Define Recipients wizard allows the defining of recipients that will receive the email message specified in the job when the job is finally sent.

The wizard has up to five pages: Source, Source Details, Recipients Details, Advanced Settings, and Summary.

The top row of the wizard displays links to these five pages. The page that is currently open is highlighted. Depending on the choices made on some of the wizard pages, other pages may become disabled or may be shown in different versions. If a wizard page is disabled, then it means that this page is not necessary with the current choices and can safely be ignored.

Recipients Details Page: Customize Email, Name and Other Merge Header Names

A preview table of sample recipients is displayed here. The table includes edit fields for the column headers. These fields are used to edit the headers. Headers may contain letters, numbers, and the underscore (but must start with a letter). Spaces and other characters are not allowed. An error message will be displayed if illegal characters appear in the headers.

If recipients data is specified that did not contain header information, then LISTSERV Maestro will add the generic default header names FIELD1, FIELD2, FIELD3, and so on. These names are not meaningful. Edit them to help identify the information in each column.

The header names choosen here become the names of the available mail merge text placeholders (a reason why it is a good idea to supply meaningful names for the headers). For example, if a header name is used (enclosed in "&" and ";") in the message body or subject, then this field will be replaced with the value from the column in the recipients data that corresponds to the header and the row that corresponds to the recipient.

Each of the recipients columns is shown together with a choice that allows you to decide how Maestro shall handle this column:

• E-Mail: This column provides the individual recipient email address. Choosing the email address column is mandatory and only valid Internet email addresses in this column are used during delivery, all other recipients are ignored.
• Name: If your recipient data contains an individual recipient name column, then it is very much recommended to also make this choice. The individual names are included in the "To:" field of each individual message, making the email more personalized and increasing the success of your message.
• Merge Field: Choose this option if the recipient data column contains supplementary information that you plan to use for mail-merging. Typical examples are telephone numbers, sales regions or address zip codes.
• Ignore: In some cases, your uploaded file, database query or LDAP search may provide recipient columns that are not useful for mail merging or that contain invalid values, and that would only inflate the recipient profiles unduly. (The value may for example exceed the maximum length of 255 characters, in which case choosing "Ignore" allows you to include a recipient record that would otherwise be declared as "bad" and is left out in your mailing.) If you wish to undo your choice and once again include a column in your recipient data that you previously decided to ignore, note that the column is added to the list of ignored columns at the bottom of the screen. Click the the little icon of the ignored column in this list to once again use it as merge field (or even as "Name" or "E-Mail" field).

If your data contains very many recipient columns that you wish to ignore in the recipient profile, then click the Ignore all fields except Email and Name link at the bottom. This is identical to selecting the "Ignore" choice described above for each column with the "Merge Field" choice selected, only saving you from the cumbersome task of doing this separately for each column.

In addition to this choice per column, you can edit the headers of all columns. This might be required if the column headers do not match the names that you want to use as the merge fields. For example, if your table happens to have "non-meaningful" headers like "COL1, ... COLn", then you can rename them here to give them more meaningful names, making it easier to use them for mail merging. Changing the header names in Maestro does not in any way affect the actual database table; it only renames the columns for the purposes of Maestro's mail merging.

Hidden Option: Ignore Recipient Data / Bulk Email

If you have enabled this hidden option in your preferences, then you have an additional choice at the top of the screen. Select one of these alternatives:

• Use additional recipient data for mail merging and tracking: This is the default behavior (which also applies if this option is hidden).

• Ignore additional recipient data and send job as bulk email: The job is sent as a bulk email (which might be slightly more efficient for very large mailings and/or very limited available processing capabilities of your email delivery infrastructure). However, in this case, mail merging in the text of the message is not possible and, due to this, only blind tracking is possible and various reporting features in LISTSERV Maestro are unavailable. All recipient columns except for the email column are ignored (see below).

If you selected the Ignore additional recipient data and send job as bulk email option, then you need to supply the values for the "To:" field manually. With bulk sending, all recipients receive exactly the same email content, (including all email headers) so you cannot have different "To:" fields for different recipients, just like you cannot have mail merging. However, some sort of "To:" field is required. Following email standards, this field must contain an email address (usually of the recipient) and, optionally, a name. Since all recipients get the same "To:" field value, it cannot contain an actual recipient's address or name. Therefore, with bulk jobs, it has become common practice to use a generic email address for your own organization - usually the sender address or an "info" address, with a matching name. An example of this might be "info@mycorp.com" as the address and "Your MyCorp Team" as the name. Enter values that fulfill your requirements into the matching edit fields.

Note: Be sure to use an authentic email address in the "To:" field to avoid any bounces that might occur if recipients "Reply to all" in response to your message.

With this option selected, you cannot rename the column headers, and it is not necessary, since mail merging is disabled anyway.