Email in Helios

[summergrlz]

I am trying to send out a mass email to our clients for our december promotions. I went into the email section and selected all clients emails.....the problem is, the program isn't sending out the email. I dont know what i am doing wrong? Please help!

[eileen]

Did you call Helios tech support?

[summergrlz]

No, i dont have tech support any more...

[unity]

We have NEVER got Helios Smart Mail to work for us, not once in over a year. They still have an "open ticket" on the problem when I call to see if they fixed it. Our problem is that you cant use and e-mail address as authentication - which a good number of services (SBC) require.

We have resorted to generating it to file, then sending it over to our Mac where it sends them out uses these hot new template files in Leopard

But I shall try to help. Do you have Smart Mail configured right?

This is step by step for the first time, so some of it is review for you:

1 - For some odd reason go to the Employee menu and select Smart Mail and enter password.
2 - Create new data
3 - Select e-mail
4 - In the pop-up select the e-mail you want pulled, probably Home, click ok
5 - On the next screen just click next to pull from all clients
6 - "Are you sure?" Click yes
7 - You should see a pop-up with the number of records pulled, click ok and then finish

At this time the Smart Mail app will open

1- Click on "View" and then "Settings"
2 - Make sure your name and e-mail is correct
3 - Click on the SMTP tab
4 - Make sure your outgoing mail server is correct. You may have to call your provider.
5 - If your provider requires authentication, check "Use authentication" and fill in the correct info and click apply.
6 - At this point Smart Mail will crash
7 - Call helios (which you cant, but I just did)
8 - They will tell you that Smart Mail is no longer supported and the problem will NEVER be fixed. You explain to them that you have DSL SPECIFICALLY for Smart Mail e-mails and they will say how they dont care, that it wont be fixed and will likely never be fixed. At this point you hang up and tell yourself that these guys are idiots who are money oriented and NOT salon oriented.

If you don't use outbound server authentication, you may get it to work so follow those steps up to there. But you should know, your service provider should be contacted. They may freeze your account for bulk e-mailing.

[eileen]

It works fine for us. Helios is also rolling out a new service from exact target to track everything about the smartmail you send

[unity]

Thats great for you! But after a year of the previous owner try and now I - well, give up time. We shall use the current devised method, which really looks a lot better anyway. Its just that a blatant bug should not exist, period, for over a year.

[summergrlz]

I know our smart mail works, because I tested it out using just my personal email and that worked. It pulled the file, etc exaclty how you explained it. But now that i generate over 900 emails....it wont work, it just closes the screen like you said. Have you figured out a way to input these emails into another program and then send from there???

[unity]

There is a major inconsistency in Helios on this.

What we have to do it the above, but once it tells you that it extract "XXX" number of clients, you clock ok and go back to where is says the export method and select "save as" instead and go through it again.

Not sure why, maybe it works for you, but on our if we select "save as" right away, it grabs all 9000 clients we have listed, not the relatively few that have e-mails.

Weird. Maybe I should call....

[unity]

Just called, no other way to do it. So you have to use the "trick" above to generate the data, go back and do it again - but since it was done once it just reads the currently created file which you can now save as.

[summergrlz]

WHen I "save as" it saves as a MDB file..and then i have no program to open it?