[Automator] steps to send individualized emails

[John Kiss]

On Nov 23, 2007, at 10:15 PM, Mary Anne Seney wrote:

> My task is to send individualized emails to everyone in my Address  
> Book.
>
> I only have to individualize the emails by sending them one at a  
> time and beginning with Dear (first name)and then put in the body of  
> the email.
>
> Can someone help me with actual set up for this task in Automator?

I'm a "light" automator user. It just has too many bugs and quirks to  
make it worthwhile for anything other than very simple tasks. However,  
upon seeing your posting I decided to see if I could make this work. I  
created a workflow using these actions: New Mail Message/Find Groups  
in Address Book/Group Mailer. I stopped there because of many, many  
problems.

First of all, the Group Mailer actions says a requirement is to have  
an outgoing email ready with the subject and body filled in. That's  
totally incorrect. I couldn't get that to work and kept getting an  
error message in automator about there being no outgoing message. Went  
on the internet to see what was up and found others complaining about  
that also. One workaround was to use a New Mail Message action which I  
then did and got as far as creating the mail messages addressed to the  
proper people but the 'body' text was getting screwed up with each new  
message created. Saw another internet posting that said to create a  
finder plugin instead of running in automator. I did that and crashed  
my Mail. I sent a not-so-nice report to apple telling them not to  
waste people's time by releasing such garbage software.

I gave up after that. I'm running OS 10.5.1.

Good luck,
John