Personalized Attachments

It is sometimes necessary to send different attachments to different people. If you want to do so, you need to prepare the files to be attached and then make a Data Field that will be pointing to the files.

Preparing data fields

For each customer, you need to have a data field that refers to the file name to be attached. For example, you may have a Customer Id data field. Let us assume we have three customers: John , Joe and Jill and that they have Customer IDs 123, 124 and 125 respectively.

Preparing files

You need to put all the files into the same directory, for example C:\FILES. You need to name your files uniformly. Typically, the name of the file should begin with a prefix (you do not have to use the prefix if you do not want to) and end with a postfix (which is also optional). The postfix will usually include the file extension. For example, if you are sending out billing statements, you can decide to prefix your file names with bill and use .pdf as a postfix. If we have three customers, as stated above, we have to create three files - bill123.pdf for John, bill124.pdf for Joe and bill125.pdf for Jill. We need to put all these files into the C:\FILES folder.

Setting up the attachment

1. Click on the message tab end then click on the Attachments button. The Attachments dialog will appear.

2. Click on the Add Custom button. If it is grayed, you need to set up data field first. The Attach Custom File dialog will appear.

3. Select the directory where you put all your files under Source Directory .

4. Type in the Prefix, for example bill .

5. Select the field that contains the IDs under Data Field.

6. Type in the Postfix, for example .pdf .

7. Type in the general name of the file under File Name as the Recipients will see it, for example bill.pdf . It is very important to use a correct extension, because this determines the file type. A wrong extension will make the file unreadable. Leave this field blank if you want real file names to be used.

You are ready to send your bills out.