Links to External Data Sources

[Professional and Corporate Editions Only]
If you keep your recipient data in a database, you can create AY Mail project which is linked to your database. AY Mail will only pull the list of recipients from the database every time it sends, so all the changes in your database will be automatically reflected in AY Mail sendinds. You do not have to worry about synchronizing recient list in AY Mail with your database.

You do not necessarily need to use a database - you can use files, mail folders, address books - the full list of suitable sources can be found here.

You can use nearly all AY Mail features with projects linked to external data sources - you can do searches, preview your messages, use any of the database fileds for mail merge and personalization, you can use groups to restrict your mailing to only a part of the database.

When a linked project is loaded into AY Mail, you will not see addresses on the Recipients tab. Rather, you'll see the description of the data source. The recipients may be pre-loaded and viewed using buttons on the Recipients tab.

To avoid frequent loading of database data, AY Mail keeps the database in your computer memory once they're loaded. For example, if you preview your message, then look at the recipients, then send, the data will be retrieved only once. By default, AY Mail keeps the data ready for 3 hours, but you can extend or shorten this period by selecting Recipients->Validity Period from the main menu.

If you want to edit recipients in AY Mail, you need to bring the whole list into AY Mail by selecting Recipients->Convert to internal. This will break the link to the data source and from that moment on, AY Mail will store the list of recipients internally, so you can edit and manipulate them. But, you cannot convert the project back.

You can change the link to point to other source, but only if the set of Data Fields in both places is compatible.

After you do a mailing, you can export the report, which will create a CSV file with all the status and click through information. You can use this file to put this information back to your database.