Today’s Tip: Adding Mailing Lists to Your Application

1by jsalem under QuickBase Advice & Tips

Here’s another little known QuickBase feature: you can create simple mailing lists using E-mail Address fields. You can use this to send an email to all the email addresses listed in a view.

To enable it, edit your e-mail address field’s properties and, under E-Mail Options, check the "Totals" checkbox. Then click the "Save" button. Note that the field’s type must be "E-Mail". If you are currently using a text field for your email addresses, you can convert it to an e-mail field by editting its properties and clicking the "Change Field Type" button in the upper right.

Once you’ve enabled Totals, a totals line will appear in your views. At the bottom of the e-mail field’s column, you’ll see an icon of envelopes. Clicking this icon will bring up your mail program with the "To:" line set to all of the e-mail addresses listed in that field!

Now the bad news: This feature is very dependent on your mail program. It’s implemented using a supposedly standard "mailto:" link.  However, there are two problems with how mail programs typically handle these links:

1. There is a limit to the number of email addresses that can be handled. The rest of the addresses are simply lost. The limit varies by mail program but in general I think you’re safe under 100 addresses but over 1,000 addresses won’t work. Try it out and make sure to double check that the last email address in the "To:" line is the last one shown in your view.
2. Different mail programs use different characters to separate to "To:" email addresses. We’ve chosen to use semicolons which are compatible with MS Outlook.

Hope you find this feature useful!