You use the Email activity to schedule and send emails to respondents in the sample file. For example, at the start of a project you might send a message to everyone, inviting them to participate in the survey. Later, you might schedule a second job that sends reminders to respondents who have not yet responded.

Each project has its own set of email job specifications.

Email provides the following facilities:

Respondents can be selected based on any field in the participant table, allowing respondents to be selected from a queue, a set of queues, or using other criteria. You can send email to all selected respondents. Alternatively, send to a fixed number of respondents who are chosen either from the start of the queue or at random. An advanced query editor is available for participant selection and the user interface allows you to view the query output.

If you want to include information from a respondent’s sample record, or the value of a project property, insert a placeholder in the message text and the appropriate values are substituted for the placeholders when the messages are sent. This feature provides options for addressing respondents by name, and including the URL for starting the interview as part of the message.

User friendly text can be defined for the From and Reply To email addresses in the email header. For example, you can specify Survey from Customer for the invitations@customer.com From email address. Participants would then see from: "Survey from Customer" invitations@customer.com in the email header. The email header text strings are translatable.

You can select existing email body translations, or create new translations. You are also provided the option of an HTML or plain text editor when editing the email body text.

Check how the message appears to respondents by sending a test message.

You can specify that the job can be run only if the project has a particular status.

You can specify existing, and create new, translations for specific email messages.

A field in the sample record now automatically records which respondents received which email via a note of the time and date at which the email was sent.

All emails entered in the Email activity user interface are validated against a customer configurable DPM property.

If you rerun an email job, messages are only sent to respondents who were not sent the original email.

The Schedule link can be used to schedule email batches. You can specify how often, and to whom, email jobs are sent. Batches are sent using a .mrs script that can be scheduled via Windows Scheduler. Both the Email Scheduling Wizard and the .mrs script, used to send the emails, are configurable.

The Email Scheduling Wizard provides options for scheduling email jobs. The wizard opens after you click Schedule on the Email Jobs dialog.

A set of SQL tables are used for scheduling and tracking email batches. The email object model, that is used in the batch sending script, is available for other scripting purposes (if required).

The Status column indicates when a schedule is active. The Progress column shows the current number of emails sent.

There is no direct link between setting up an email job and running it. All job specifications are saved and are run only when selected from a list of email jobs for the current project.

Job specifications can be edited and deleted as required.

You can specify the email address of a user who is to be contacted if there are problems. This user is also the person who receives test emails.