Send same E-Mail to mulitple recipients with short wait times in between

Tech Support
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Hi there,

i have a kind of special problem…
I want to send an e-mail (the same text) to approx 150 recipients. But I want to send them as single E-Mails (one for each recipient) with short wait times in between (e.g.1-2 seconds).

Why?
Because I’m involved in organizing a Camp and the system mails we’re sending to inform about the details often gets moved into the spam folders of the german providers “gmx.de” and “web.de”.
I need to have short wait times in between because our mail provider doesn’t allow to send “mass e-mails” and the recipients should of course not see each-other.
Using the bcc field doesn’t really help in that case AFAIK…

I have the text of the e-mail (no attachements needed) and all the e-mail adresses available in plain text (formatted text for the e-mail but markdown support is sufficient).

The “sender e-mail address” is not my default (private) mail address, I would like to specify the sender Mail which is already set-up in Apple Mail.

If anyone has a nice idea to help me out here it would be great!
I checked Mail-Merge in pages but it seems that this is not what I want to do.
It might be possible with Apple Script but I don’t know.

2

This probably won’t help you unless you really like playing with automation, but this is what I did when I had the same problem…

  • TURN OFF YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION FOR TESTING!
  • Put all the email addresses in Excel, Numbers, etc. Just one big column.
  • Get out your copy of Keyboard Maestro.
  • Using Keyboard Maestro, create a counted loop with the number of email addresses you have (“repeat 150 times”), and repeat these actions:
    • Switch to the spreadsheet, arrow down one to the next address.
    • Copy the email address out of your spreadsheet.
    • Switch to your email client.
    • Compose new message
    • Put in the email address, tab to the subject field, put in the subject, tab to the body, put that in too.
    • Send the message
    • Wait 2-3 seconds
  • Test the above with a smaller loop (10 addresses or so), make sure it works, then fire it up and walk away while it sends.

I actually did that with a multi-column Excel file, multiple merge fields, etc. Worked really slick.

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This sounds ridiculous :fire: great idea and thanks for the quick response.

Pointing me to keyboard maestro was actually enough to check out if I could use shortcuts for it.

Sometimes you don’t see the easy solution first.
But a few steps in shortcuts should solve my problem (I don’t have multiple fields I want to replace in the email, the same text is used for all recipients.

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This is the most part of it. The steps above only define the text for the mail and the list of emails (I’ll actually create them with a split text action :+1:t3:

4

Yeah, it’s kind of ridiculous. I had multiple merge fields and other weird custom stuff I was doing, so it’s what I knew how to do. :slight_smile: Glad you got it sorted in Shortcuts!

5

Another option is to test with mailinator.com addresses.

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6

Also, if you’re sending from your own domain, make sure you have proper SPF and other email-related DNS settings. It makes a big difference spam-filter-wise. There are tons of checkers out there like this one.

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Maybe use an account with a mailing list service provider, e.g. Mailchimp. Their “free” account seems to have the capacity you need. Eliminates the throttling and all the complexity with “rolling your own”.

I’ve used them for years with success.

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8

Thunderbird + Mail Merge addon let’s you send individual mails in batch and have delays between them. Just set it up with your regular SMPT mail settings.

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