| Access Reports Automatic Mailer History |
| The idea came after getting extremely annoyed by sending, every day, 50 page faxes to 4 different partners located in 3 countries. Huge phone bills, enormous quantities of paper wasted, highly unreliable connection determined me to seek a way to send the reports by email. This meant, from the beginning, a substantial reduction in the phone bills and paper consumption, but it still took a long time to set the report parameters in such a way that each partner would get only his data... Not to mention that we, humans, can easily forget important things. Therefore, an automated way of sending data was absolutely necessary. Thinking about it, I decided to create some sort of interface for any user to tell the computer what to send and when. Afterwards, I felt appropriate to have it wake up by itself in the afternoon, after everybody has finished working, deliver everything and then close.. At last, everyone seems to be happy: I can finish my working program at a reasonable time, as the mailer takes care of gathering the data and delivering the information to the recipients. The company lowered its costs by around 1500 USD per month. The partners have never missed a report ever since. And it's so easy now to include any other report or recipient in the list, that everyone is surprised of how fast the information reaches the destination. No need to create dozens of identical reports based on different parameters: just one is enough, as the mailer has its own filter wizard. When I realized it was something really useful for Access users, I decided to place it on the Internet and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that many people have downloaded it and installed it successfully on their machines. Some of them even asked me to customize the program to suit their specific needs, which I gladly did. |