Sometimes I need to send an email to a mass amount of people. The content is essentially the same but sometimes the attachments are different. A project in which scads of people are involved might require the same text but different data. I do NOT want to send the budget piece to marketing lest they complain that they are getting stiffed for their required margarita intake. I also do not necessarily want to subject upper management to the minutiae that is needed by R&D.

Therefore I propose that email providers add a very simple feature to email programs. When I attach a file, I would like to designate who receives that file. I might say that the budget spreadsheet goes to finance and management. The technical specs go to R&D. The simplified tech specs go to marketing. And the animated gif with the dog being randy goes to my buddy on the 4th floor.
-- bdag, Nov 13 2009

Bccthis https://addons.mozi...irefox/addon/152207
My wish comes true. Oh happy day. [bdag, Apr 28 2010]

So a draft that can be repetitively altered sightly and sent.
-- wjt, Nov 13 2009


this sounds like (already existing?) portions of collaboration software.
-- FlyingToaster, Nov 13 2009


The issue is that I don't want to re-compose the email several times. I want all the text to be the same. Copy and paste is just too yesterday. Perhaps collaboration software can handle the task at hand but this is a fix for a simple email client. It seems like an easy enough task: You could end up with a matrix of the recipients on x and the attachments on y. Default is that either all receive or all don't receive. Just go through and check or uncheck the boxes. Would also be handy when I need to send the same text to several people, but only one person gets an attachment.
-- bdag, Nov 13 2009


if you're willing to settle for a link instead of an attachment you could probably kludge something up like that (in Unix, anyways).
-- FlyingToaster, Nov 13 2009


[+] I'll bun it but that only opens the door to more "I didn't get the attachment" excuses.
-- Jscotty, Nov 16 2009


My invention has now been baked! So do I win a prize? Sneers? Snubbing? Swift kick to the head?
-- bdag, Apr 28 2010


A grid of check boxes like you suggest sounds like it could be quite prone to misclicks.

Perhaps the idea should include a way to designate particular file extensions, and particular email recipients, as belonging to particular groups within the company. So for instance you could designate all .xls files as being "financial", which would mean that by default they would only get sent to recipients within the company's "financial" division.

This would allow your email client to come up with a useful set of defaults for the grid of checkboxes, which could then be tweaked as appropriate before clicking "Send".

The assignment of recipients to divisions could even be shared as part of the company-wide staff directory offered by clients such as Outlook.
-- Wrongfellow, Apr 28 2010



random, halfbakery