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Mass mailings skip duplicate e-mail addresses
 
I've posted this for TB support, but haven't yet received an answer.  Maybe someone on the forum can help me:

I am using The Bat! Pro, v. 3.71.03.  I like many of the new features.

Using Mass Mailings, I think that I've noticed that, if I have two or more address-book entries with the same e-mail address, only one message gets sent out.  Is that right, and how can I make Mass Mailings send a message to *each* of my address-book entries, even when there are duplicate addresses?

I'm holding up a mass mailing until I can get an answer to this, so if possible it would be nice to get the answer earlier rather than later.  Thank you.  --Howard Cherniack
 
I can confirm that behaviour.
Over here TB acts the same way and I'm using the latest beta.

As a rule TB acts unexpected with a lot of features concerning the address book as soon as you've got multiple entries with the same address.
In this case however, I should say that TB acts as it should, one message per address.

Nothing you can do about it.
__________________________________
I'm just a user of The Bat! I don't work for Ritlabs.
 
Wow, an answer in just 16 minutes!  I'm very impressed.

OK, thanks for the confirmation.  In my case, I have some people who share e-mail addresses but should be addressed as individuals.  But "Working As Designed" is a valid answer.  (Suggestion: maybe this would be a nice option.)

I have some ideas for a work-around: sorting the address book by address, making a first "everyone" pass, then selecting the second occurrences of the duplicated address for another pass, and so on--think it'll work?

Thanks for the quick and authoritative answer.  Cheers, --Howard
 
After a full day of working around the problem, I'm afraid that the answer, while quick and authoritative, is quite disappointing.

I am the registrar for a small science-fiction convention, and want to send some mass mailings to our members.  Some of them (especially within families or companies) share email addresses; because some are friends, some of the addresses also appear in other, personal, address books (I found at least one case where a mass-mailing from one address book found data attached to that same email address in another address book).

I attempted a few workarounds: adding a %TO="some field containing address" in the message just adds to the address; adding %TO="" and then %TO="some field" just results in a blank address field in the message.

I think that TB! devlopers must have made an unfortunate design decision in (it appears) keying everything off email addresses.  True, it allows cute stuff like being able to look in the address book for information on the sender of a message I've received, but it's certainly a great pain in my circumstances, which cannot be that unusual.

Thanks again for your reply.  Cheers, --Howard
 
We have added a query window "This mass mailing has found contacts in the address book that share the same e-mail address. Do you wish to skip duplicates contacts in this mass mailing so there will be one message per distinct e-mail?", in a new version 3.81.13 BETA which we will release soon. You can either test this beta version or get this fixed in a stable release when it becomes available.

To test a beta version, please subscribe to TBBETA mailing list, by sending a message to mailto:tbbeta-join@thebat.dutaint.com

When you subscribe, please ask about the recent beta download URL in this list.

You can find out more about this list at http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/subtbeta.txt

We will also be thankful if you suggest a better, more concise or meaningful message to this query window.
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