
Serial Mail (Lite): Group Mail and Templates with HTML and CSS 4.2
Category: Productivity
Price: Free, Version: 4.1 -> 4.2 (iTunes)

Description:
NOTE: This is the lite (free) version of Serial Mail. It is fully functional. However, this ‘lite version’ of Serial Mail will show a message at the bottom of each generated email. The full version will not show this message!
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[ App demo video available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC0HNDJMeJY ]
Serial Mail allows to create and organize rich text (HTML) email templates.
Templates can contain placeholders which are then merged with the corresponding address book data creating personalized mails.
Use Cases
Some use cases for this app are:
- Sending emails to a group of people (cannot be done with the build in mail).
- Sending personalized newsletters.
- Sending personalized greetings at Christmas or new year.
- Sending personalized information to group participating in an event, e.g., a seminar, etc.
- You can use the ‘Notes’ part of the recipients address book entry to maintain info (e.g., point achieved in a test) and automatically include these notes in the generated email.
- Serial Mail is useful even without using the personalization: it allows to maintain and organize a set of HTML email templates.
Detailed Description
With Serial Mail you can create an email template containing certain placeholders (e.g., for the name of the recipient). You then create a list of recipients. Then, for each recipient Serial Mail replaces the placeholder by the corresponding value from the recipients address book entry and generate a personalized mail for each recipient.
Serial Mail does not replace Apple Mail. It does not send the emails. Instead each generated email is showed for review and optional editing. If accepted the generated mail is then placed in your Apple Mail’s outbox. In other words, Serial Mail takes your template, merges it with your Address Book data and puts the generated email in your Apple Mail outbox.
Features
Placeholders for Recipient’s Address Book Data: For each recipient, Serial Mail takes the template and replaces any of the Serial Mail placeholders by the corresponding value from the recipients Address Book entry. Note: You do not have to enter these placeholders by hand, you can pick them from a list.
Styled Text (HTML) Templates: Templates can be HTML and the generated mail can be sent as HTML mail. The template editor provides a picker list for easy entry of the most common HTML tags, like for bold text, for italic text, etc.
Organizing Templates: You can organize your templates in groups. To create a group or edit names or order of group tap the ‘Group’ button in the template list. Note: A group can be deleted only if it is empty.
When editing a list view with sections it may happen that a row cannot be moved beyond the last row. As a workaround, you can add a dummy row to the end of your list.
Send Queue and SMTP Accounts: A template can be set to use a specific SMTP account. In this case mails are send without user interaction (quickly). On multitasking aware devices the send queue is processed in background.
Note: If sending has failed you can retry by tapping “Send” in the send queue view.
IMPROTANT NOTE: User defined SMTP accounts do not work oniPad (iOS 3.2). This will be fixed in the upcomming version 4.2.
What’s New
Version 4.2 brings the following improvements:
- Bug fixing: User defined SMTP accounts now work under iPhone OS 3.2 (iPad).
- Stability improvements for the send queue for mails using their own SMTP account.
Serial Mail (Lite): Group Mail and Templates with HTML and CSS