Sending Bulk E-Mails with ConfTool (Pro)

Organizers and chairs of conferences often have to contact the authors, reviewers and participants of their event to send them news or updates. Furthermore, they might have to inform them about e.g. the results of the review process, remind them to pay the participation fees or invite them to register for participation, become a member of the program committee, act as a reviewer or submit a contribution.

To simplify this task, ConfTool offers different bulk e-mail functions. Users with administrative rights can access them after log-in from the overview page using the link "Bulk E-Mails".

As the first step you have to choose what kind of e-mail you are going to send:

• For general mails on the conference, select "Send E-Mails to a Group of Users". You can also use this function to contact reviewers, program committee members and chairs.
• If you want to contact the authors (and co-authors) to send them information regarding their submission, please use "Send E-Mails to Authors (and co-authors)"
• If you want to contact prospective users on the list of invitations, select "Send E-mails to a Group of People in the ‘List of Invitations’" (You must have first compiled a list of invitations for this option, ConfTool Pro only).
• If you have to contact the participants of specific sub-events or with a certain payment status, choose "Send E-Mails to Participants" (ConfTool Pro).

The next step is to specify the group of recipients of your bulk e-mail, to set the sender name and address and to enter the message subject and body.

Please note that in “text mode” an automatic line break will be inserted after 78 characters (as this is standard for most e-mail clients and servers). If you want to send a document like a PDF file to the recipients, we recommend to put that file on your website and send them the link to that file. (Attaching documents to bulk e-mails can cause significant network traffic as the file is sent to each recipient separately and it can trigger spam filters and cause mail servers to block further mails from this sender address.)

Below the message text area you find a selection of "codes" like {dear_fullname} that can be used in the bulk e-mail and that are replaced by data according to the recipient of the e-mail, e.g. his name, the title of his submission or the results of the review process. Please note that the codes must be entered exactly as listed, including the curly brackets {}.