I have a couple of ideas to make Bells and Whistles better (nifty little program, by the way).

Make some of the features 'prompted' features. Not just enabled/disabled like you can turn the 'automatically BCC to this address' off and on. If there were a 'prompt me' feature that you could select then B&W could prompt you each time a new email is created as to whether or not you wanted to use the AutoBCC feature. Same thing with 'insert greeting' feature.

Also, I have created a few templates and they are a very nice and potentially powerful feature. However, I notice that there's no way to use variables in them. It would be much more powerful if you could specify and place various variables (pulled from Outlook fields) throughout the template. An example would be:



You get the idea. What do you think? Are these do-able?

Hi Jay,

Thanks for the suggestions, we really appreciate them!

On the "prompted" features suggestion, I don't think that would work very well as the program aims to increase your productivity while working with Outlook, but such "prompted" features would slow you down when handling emails, as you would have to manually choose Yes/No each time for each enabled feature. However, we plan to add rules to these features: for example, you will be able to set B&W to apply a feature (like the autoBCC) only if the email is going to be sent to a member of a pre-defined list. Like you have the Outlook rules wizard.

On the templates, I think your suggestion is very good and we will surely implement it. As I see it now, the variables can only take data from the receiver's Contacts entry (like name, nickname, address, phone, etc).

The same variables feature we plan to implement on the BCC to mail merge feature, so you can make personalized mail merge sessions.

Thanks again,
Bogdan

Ok... thanks. Good to know you will continue to improve it!

i also like the idea of building some 'intelligence' into the templates - it would be a big improvement.

continuing with this same theme i would like to be able to do the same thing with the BCC mail merge feature.

in particular personally address each email.

Hi %firstname%

thanks for your consideration

Darryl

Hi Darryl,

Can you please advise what do you mean by building intelligence into the templates?

On the BCC mail merge, we are almost ready to release a dedicated addin, designed for personalising mass emails. See the Easy Mail Merge section of this forum - if you want to beta test the product, just drop me a line.

Regards
Bogdan

Hi Bogdan.
what i meant by building intelligence into the templates was that i was agreeing totally with Jay's suggestion of being able to use outlook contact's fields in the template. i think this would make a great addition/enhancement to B&W templates.
this would help to personalise the email a little more.

as for the BCC mail merge - i'm really only asking for one extra piece of functionality of adding the contacts first name to each of the emails sent using the BCC/merge function (in the same way that you are able to include the contact's name in the reply greeting of B&W).

i don't have a great need for email merge. i may want to send/forward/reply an email to 3-30 people in my list without them all seeing who i have sent it to. the current BCC option is perfect for my level of need.

can you give us any indication/tease of when we could expect to see this?

i'm ready for some new features/enhancements. bug fixes are great but not exciting.

good thinking Jay i like it

after such a long wait for an update and reading your comments here, (we will surely implement it) i'm disappointed that this did not make it into version 3. (unless i'm missing something in the settings?)

this would be a great addition for those that don't need the full features of a full blown mail merge solution.

is there any chance that we will see this soon?