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Send bulk messages using the Bulk Wizard

The Bulk Wizard is build into the SMS Server manager but has its own icon in the start menu as well. Use the Bulk Wizard to create completely customized SMS or E-mail bulk mailing campaigns from almost any data source.

You can use campaigns to save different campaigns and run them any time you want.

These data sources are supported:

  • Microsoft Excel
  • Microsoft Access
  • SQL Server
  • Any other ODBC compatible database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc..)
  • LDAP servers or LDAP enabled Active Directory (AD) servers
  • CSV text files

You can send a bulk mailing to a specific SMS or E-mail channel or the SMS Server can automatically route the messages according to the routing rules that you specified.

Selecting a channel and a data source

A walk through the bulk wizard starts with selecting a target channel and a data source.

Bulk Wizard - Select Channel

Bulk Wizard – Select channel

After selecting the channel you can specify the details of the data source.

Bulk Wizard - Select datasource

Bulk Wizard – Select data source

If we select the MS Excel options the wizard will ask to further specify which excel sheet to use and which filter to apply.

Bulk Wizard - Excel sheet filter

Bulk Wizard – Excel sheet filter

Sending SMS messages

Bulk Wizard - Format SMS

Bulk Wizard – Format SMS

The next page is different depending on whether you chose SMS or E-mail. For SMS message this is what the formatting page looks like.

You can select which column from your data source should be the recipient address.

Format the body text from a combination of static text and field from your data source. The next screen will show how the definitive texts looks before sending them. That screen will also provide an opportunity to schedule the SMS messages in the future.

Sending E-mail messages

Bulk Wizard - Format e-mail

Bulk Wizard – Format e-mail

The format page for e-mail looks a little bit different from the format page for SMS message. It also has some extra functionality specifically for e-mail messages.

It is possible to only provide HTML formatted text. The Bulk wizard will then automatically generate a matching plain-text version of the e-mail by removing all of the HTML formatting.

This is an important step because spam filters like the popular SpamAssassin require that the e-mail contains a plain text body that is very similar to what the HTML body looks like.

Finish

The next step will ask you to review the generated messages. With this step complete all of the messages will be automatically created in the SMS Server and send out at the time they where scheduled for.