Sending email to all users/patrons

• Article Type: General
• Product: Aleph
• Product Version: 20

Description:
[From Global Aleph Users list:] Has anyone of you ever had to send an email to all users (patrons) within your aleph-system and how did you do it?

Resolution:
[From Yosef Branse, University of Haifa:]

I don't know whether there is a utility within Aleph for sending mail to all users, but a combination of several elements in your computing environment may be useful.

For instance, a list of email addresses can be generated with a simple SQL statement, 'select z304_email_address from z304'
with output to a text file.

If you use the z305_bor_type and z305_bor_status fields in z305 to hold data regarding different categories of users (such as student/faculty/administrative staff or B.A./M.A/Ph.D students, etc.), the above query can be modified to produce specialized lists - e.g.,

 select z304_email_address from z304, z305 where substr(z304_rec_key,1,12)=substr(z305_rec_key,1,12) and z305_bor_status = '10';

The resulting list can be imported into your email system as a 'Bcc' header for the message you want to send.

Also, if your institutional mail system (e.g., Microsoft Exchange) provides access to mailing lists, maybe some of these would be appropriate for your needs, without the need to generate a list on your own from the Aleph tables.

All of the above is a very general guideline, and of course in practice depends on your specific configuration and your staff members' access to, and familiarity with, the relevant tools.

• Article last edited: 10/8/2013