Message Template

This section describes how CustomMailer message templates work, with a primary focus on plain text messages. The additional considerations involved with HTML mail messages are covered in the chapter "HTML Mail".

You can create a plain text message template within CustomMailer itself or read your message template from a regular plain text file (which you must save as text in a .txt file).

Create Message Template inside CustomMailer

The easiest way to create your message template is to do so inside CustomMailer. Here's how:

1. Under the File menu, select the item "New Message Template...".
2. You will be asked if you wish to create a "Plain text message" or an "HTML message". For purposes of this section, we will be using the "Plain text message" option.
3. You will be reminded of what your current tag indicator is. This is also always shown to the lower left of the body of the message. If desired, you can change this in Preferences.
4. Click on the "Template" button to the left of the message body (or in the "View" menu select "as Template") to make sure you are in template mode (text will be shown in blue).
5. Enter your message in the TO, FROM, and SUBJECT header fields as well as the message body. Optionally, you can enter of the other email header fields. Use tags as appropriate, for example, |email| in the FROM field. The sections "Body & Headers", "Tags", and "Macros" below will describe in greater detail what the contents of these fields should be.
6. When you are done, select "Save Message Template to File..." under the File menu. Thereafter CustomMailer will remember this file name and open it each time you start up CustomMailer.

Message Template in a File

You can also create your message template file outside of CustomMailer using a word processor or text editor, and then save to a text (.txt) file and read this file into CustomMailer.

The sections "Body & Headers", "Tags", and "Macros" below will describe in greater detail what the content of your email message template should be.

When you have finished composing your mail message, use the "Save As" command in your word processor or text editor to save your message template. Make sure you change the "Save as type" to "Text only (*.txt)" in your Save As file dialog, then click on "Save".

To read your message template into CustomMailer, use the "Open Message Template" command in the CustomMailer "File" menu. This menu item will pop-up a set of choices. The first of these choices is "Open Message Template..." which will open a standard Windows file dialog and let you find and open the message template .txt file you saved from your word processor or text editor. CustomMailer will remember the most recently read message template file and what folder it is in when you run CustomMailer next time.

CustomMailer will also remember a set of the several most recent message template files you have opened (by default, 5, which you can change in Preferences). The Open Message Template menu will display and let you quickly select any of these previous message template files. Since the current message template file is the first in this "history" list, you can use this feature to quickly "reload" a message template that you may have changed inside CustomMailer in order to restore it to its original state or to pick up any changes you may have made to the message template file from a different program while CustomMailer is running.

Body & Headers

If you compose your message in a text editor or word processor, you can add to your message template lines beginning with TO:, FROM:, SUBJECT:, ORGANIZATION:, REPLY-TO:, RETURN-TO:, CC:, BCC:, ATTACHMENTS:, and PRIORITY: (must be all capital letters) to specify these email header values. You can also indicate this message template's tag indicator character using a line beginning with TAG INDICATOR:. These header lines can appear in any order, but must all appear first. All the remaining lines will be regarded as part of the message body. You can subsequently add or modify any or all of these header values once you bring your message into CustomMailer. When you use "Save" or "Save As" inside CustomMailer, the contents of your header fields will be saved with the header designators specified as above.

You normally enter your messages without "line wrap", i.e., you only need to hit "Enter" when you want to force an explicit line break ("hard carriage return") in your message, for example to start a new paragraph or to insert blank lines. While in template mode, CustomMailer will automatically wrap the text based on the current window width. After you select one or more recipients and the message expands based on each recipient's data, CustomMailer rewraps the lines to stay within the maximum number of characters per line specified in Preferences. Because you may be substituting strings of varying size for the tags in your message, CustomMailer performs line wrap separately for each recipient's actual expanded message.

»