CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

This is a request to make it just as easy for users to send emails via Outlook/Thunderbird/etc as it is to send emails via the Send Email to Contacts action.

Why? Because often we want to send emails but not record them in CiviCRM. The activity screen gets filled with emails that hide more important details.

The Send Email to Contacts action is quite neat. 1 screen, edit the contents, and send.

But using an email client takes about 5-6 screens: Export contacts action, select fields (default will do but hard to find emails with all those columns), download, open spreadsheet, copy email addresses to email client, edit and send email.

It would be good to have two actions: Send Email to Contacts as Activity and Send Email to Contacts via Email Client (or something less wordy).

My extensive research (a Google search) indicates that using a mailto link for multiple recipients is not going to be a simple solution as different email clients do different things. Perhaps Send Email to Contacts via Email Client could just return a list of email addresses that the user could cut and paste in their email client. Ugly but efficient.

Thanks for the suggestion, DMC!

It doesn't quite solve my issue, which is that Civi has such nice search features that I would dream of (or want in) my email client. But thanks, for the thought.

Ken

Why? Because often we want to send emails but not record them in CiviCRM. The activity screen gets filled with emails that hide more important details.

Seems to me it might be convenient to have the e-mails be recorded in CiviCRM, but have them be hidden (optionally) when you are viewing the activity screen.

Another feature that would be convenient is the ability to use the CiviCRM system as though it were a google/yahoo style listserv, where you'd send a message to an address denoting a group-name, and your message is passed on to the e-mail addresses in the group. (optionally allowing all in the group, or only the group owner, to send this way).

With our database, it would be nice to have all of the groups of constituents duplicated online google groups/yahoo groups except that i doubt anybody would be willing to keep them up to date.

Another feature that would be convenient is the ability to use the CiviCRM system as though it were a google/yahoo style listserv, where you'd send a message to an address denoting a group-name, and your message is passed on to the e-mail addresses in the group. (optionally allowing all in the group, or only the group owner, to send this way).

An option of doing that is using an external listserv that is able to query the members emails in civicrm. There is an option on sympa to set your own custom sql query to fetch the members, and that's we've done in one install.

Cons: you need to set up manually the link between the email of your list and the sql you want to run, and you need to have your listserve server have access to the mysql of civicrm.

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