There was a thread in the forum a few weeks ago about adding generic replacements for tokens that dont have a value for a specific contact. An example is where the first name field is blank and the organization would want to substitute friend or member instead of keeping it blank. The token engine does not provide this functionality by default, however implementing it via a hook is relatively trivial.

Greetings and Salutations :-)

As some of you may already know, the existing "Greeting Type" feature in CiviCRM is pretty broken. You can't use it to specify a greeting for either email or printed / postal communications (no token or export support). In addition, as described in Tony Guzman's recent blog on Better Household Management - it's not designed to support a number of key use cases.

So... Tony and the folks at Dharmatech have been working with us to figure out a flexible WORKING solution which can handle the simple cases ("Dear Dave") as well as the more complex cases ("Dear Dave and Bob", "The Honorable Scout Conberg", etc.). If you haven't read Tony's blog yet - start with the Greetings and Salutations section there. Then, if this is an issue that affects you - check out the details of the proposed implementation in the issue tracker.

Trellon has been working on a fairly large implementation of CiviCRM for an advocacy group based in DC that was seeking to implement a CRM system that will help them manage their online fundraising and email marketing program. Email marketing is a large part of the organization's outreach strategy, so having a mail system that can deliver their 50,000+ emails in a short amount of time was a necessity.

The documentation for CiviCRM 2.2 is up and so are the new docs for CiviMail Installation, including a sub-page on CiviMail Processor.

Please do let us know how to improve these pages (or help even more by doing it yourself!).

Along with the introduction of CiviMail Processor as the new supported return email hander, we’ve made three changes that are relevant for third-party CiviMail developers in CiviCRM 2.2.

Unified email formats

We are excited to announce that the initial Alpha release of 2.2 is now available for download, AND to try out on our sandbox site. This release includes several major new features:

• CiviCase - case management component with configurable workflows (learn more...).
• Personal Campaign Pages - Allow constituents to create and promote their own personal fundraising pages in order to drive traffic to your organization's online contribution pages (learn more...).
• Simplified CiviMail Requirements - PHP-based option to handle return channel (bounces, replies ...) - replaces AMAVIS and simplifies installation and server access requirements.

... and scores of improvements. Check out the 2.2 Roadmap for a good overview. Or you can review a complete listing of new features, improvements and bug fixes on the issue tracker.

We strongly encourage folks to download and test the alpha release and help improve the final product. You can contribute significantly to the project by testing the upgrade process against a copy of your 2.1 data, as well as running your regular tasks on an upgraded site.

I’m happy to report a PHP counterpart to imap2soap is coming in CiviCRM 2.2, so the handling of CiviMail’s return channel should be much easier in the future (ideally as simple as setting up a cronjob).

There are also other CiviMail improvements and changes in 2.2 (kudos to U.S. PIRG for their sponsorship!) which I plan to unveil in upcoming post(s), but let’s concentrate on the return channel for now.

Hi,

On every new CiviCRM install, I've had the same question about the difference between CiviCRM (the mass mailing module) and the send mail feature (from and individual contact and a search result). The question is when to use one or the other.

I understand than historically, these two features comes from both end of the spectrum, CiviCRM was made to send newsletters and bulk emails, and the send email is a replacement of sending a mail from your mail client. However, you can have a mailing list of a handful of contacts, and you can send "individual" emails to several dozen contacts.

Hi CCRM Friends,

My name is Shane Hill. Some of you may have read my name in a few places or on some lists. This post is meant to introduce me and give some background. I am with the organization The Urban Alliance For Sustainability. http://www.uas.coop and we use CiviCRM to manage our constituency and send email blasts. At first, I was just a volunteer with UAS as I believed in their mission (now my mission) and I wanted to lend my experience to what they were (are) doing. Then in time I inherited their web operations which eventually led to having to deal with CiviMail. :)

Thanks to UAS’s Shane Hill’s impressive recent CiviMail improvements (currently, among others, an order of magnitute speed-up in email generation…) and the forthcoming changes for DA, we decided to make a separate CiviCRM release consisting of CiviCRM 1.8 and the improved CiviMail. The release will be called CiviCRM 1.9 and is developed on the v1.9 branch in our Subversion repository.