LAeMail is simple to use. After starting the program, you are presented with the main screen:

There are three tags on the main screen:

• Send - this is the main tag where you setup the details of the email to send, the recipient list, etc
• Settings - Choose this tab to set your email server settings. For more details click here
• Help - Shows this screen

Email Details

Aside from your server settings, there are three main email setting required before you can send your bulk emails:

• Subject - This is the subject line shown on the email. To change, edit the 'Subject' text box.
• Body Text - This is a file containing the main text of the email. To select a file, click the '...' button next to the 'Body Text' text box. Note, the body text file can be either a standard text file or a web page (page containing HTML). For more details about using web pages, click here.
• Recipients - This is a file containing the list of recipients. This is a text file with one or more lines of text, each line beginning with an email address. For more details about recipient files, click here.

After setting these details, the 'Start' button is enabled and you can start sending emails.

Sending Emails

Once you have set the email details and ensured your email server settings are correct, click the 'Start' button. That's it - LAeMail will now work through the list of email recipients, sending the emails to each recipient in turn:

As LAeMail works through the list of email recipients, the progress screen shows the following details:

• The total number of emails processed
• The total number of successfully sent emails
• The total number of errors encountered
• The current progress - names the email being sent and the status of the send operation

At any point, LAeMail can be stopped by clicking the 'Stop!' button.

Using Web (HTML) Pages

As well as sending text files, LAeMail can send web pages (files with .HTM or .HTML extensions). These files contain HTML tags rather than plain text and are handled differently by email clients such as Microsoft Outlook Express.

LAeMail is capable of sending any web page as an email, however there are a few rules you need to remember when sending a web page email:

• When sending a web page, you can only send a single page.
• Any links on the page must be available from the internet and shouldn't refer to local files on your machine.
• The web page can contain images, but again, these must be images available from the internet - web pages cannot contain embedded pictures or links to pictures on your local machines.
• Any references to java script files (.JS files) or style sheets (.CSS) must refer to files available on the internet and not files local to your machine.

As you can see, the main theme here is that the page must be either self contained or if there are links to images, style sheets, etc, these need to be accessible over the internet.

Recipient Files

Recipient files are text files containing a list of email addresses. Each line of the file should start with a valid email address in the form of name@host.xxx such as nigel@lowrieweb.com .

The example below shows a text file with two email entries, one on each line of the file:

nigel@lowrieweb.com support@lowrieweb.com

The recipient file can contain as many email addresses as you requires, so long as each address exists on a separate line in the file and each line begins with the email address. Note that the file can contain other details after the email address and can have non-email address lines in the file - all non-email address details are stripped out by LAeMail when the recipient list is loaded.

Settings

The settings tab allows you to set your email server settings. You only need to do this once if you are sending emails from the same machine. The server settings tells LAeMail all about your email server and the sender address:

Use this screen to set:

• Server - This is the host name or IP address of your SMTP server.
• Sender - This is the email address used in the 'From' line for the email.
• Anonymous - Click this box if your email server allows anonymous emails (if you don't need to supply a login user name and password).
• User - If your email server requires authenticated logins, supply a valid user name to log into the server
• Password - If your email server requires authenticated logins, supply a valid password for the logged in user.