CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I need to be able to send bulk email to large numbers of relatively transient sets of contacts. For example, I'll need to subset my contact list by some set of criteria, and then by zipcode. I could end up with many very similar email lists differing only by zipcode. If I use CiviMail, which requires a pre-existing group to send mail, I could end up with lots of groups littering my system. I could use the built-in CiviCRM "Send Mail to Contacts" function, but that doesn't appear to support open/clickthrough/unsubscribe processing, which are important. Any thoughts on how to solve my conundrum? I've thought of putting a front end on CiviMail that does a search, creates a group, sends the mail, then deletes the group, but that sounds very processing-intensive.

This feature is coming in 2.2

Issue is here: http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-3711

2.2 release schedule is here: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+v2.2

lobo

Sounds great, and the timing for 2.2 is perfect. One question about the feature, though: how does opt-out honoring work for contacts found via search who aren't in a formal group? Is there an implicit opt-out group I can use for the base group (as described in the JIRA ticket)? If opt-outs don't get honored then this feature doesn't really help me, unless I'm misunderstanding something.

you choose a base group for the mailing. for such dynamic mailings, we recommend folks always use the same base group (for a related set of dynamic mailings), so once users opt-out/unsubscribe, that is remembered in the base group

I'm confused. The following description from JIRA:

"The mailing should go out to all of the search results contacts plus the ones belonging to the base group, minus the contacts from the excluded groups/mailing and minus anyone who unsubscribed/was removed from the base group. "

Would seem to imply that search results and base group are additive. If I have a base group which is "all contacts who fit criteria X" and do a search for "all contacts who fit criteria X and are in zip code 10012", then my mail will go to "all contacts who fit criteria X", regardless of zipcode (and ignoring unsubscribes).

If I'm just being dumb and there's a better place to remove my ignorance (the JIRA issue, private email, etc.) just let me know.

note that the release schedule is just tentative. as with all software releases, this can (and probably will) slip

Understood. But at least the starting point for the release isn't next fall . A number of the planned 2.2 features will be a great help.

Would seem to imply that search results and base group are additive.

This is true. The idea, as Lobo said, is that you have a (initially, most probably empty) base group that can be used to handle the contacts who should always be added to, or removed from, a given search-based mailing (provided you keep using the same base group for the same, or similar, search-based mailings in the future).

Your example wrongly assumed the first mailing would be the base group; our idea is that you have a static group that you created prior to any search-based mailings (or maybe have a couple of such groups, because you do a couple of different search-based mailing ‘types’ that are unrelated to each other).