Need Linux-compatible Snail-Mail Program
 

[SIZE="1"CAMS and Freemailer are the only projects (on SourceForge) that I've discovered which come close to my appeal for a snail-mail Linux-compatible program; and they both appear to be dormant projects, no downloadable files or activity since 2004.

The Franklin County Humane Society, for whom I'm a full-time volunteer, needs to do an occasional snail-mail funding-raising appeal, sending out letters and envelopes the 'ole-fashion' way. For the general mass-mailing, we can use a commercial service with a bulk-mail permit, but for the smaller, supplemental mailings (50-300 or so), it falls to me to use some sort of program to print the addresses on envelopes. Right now, I'm 'hobbling along' with Mail Merge in OfficeOffice.org (even the Animal Shelter Management program depends on exporting to MS Word or OpenOffice.org Writer).

But it would be far better if I could maintain the complete mailing list in a dedicated mail-list program comparable to MyAdvancedMaillist (Windows format; yes, I know it's sometimes advertised as compatible with Linux, but this is false).

Are you or do you know a developer who is interested in making such a mail-list program (like MyAdvancedMaillist, an amalgam of table/spreadsheet/database-form style information reservoir with a very easy layout-design facility for making labels and addressing envelopes)?[/SIZE]:rolleyes:

I was wondering, have you tried running the
MyAdvancedMaillist with Wine? Wine has come
a long way, it may be worth a try.

Good Luck

Good to be reminded...
 

Thank you for this jogging of the memory about Wine. It's been quite a while since I took a look at Wine or Codeweaver. It's certainly worth a try!

After you mentioned Codeweavers....that's when I thought
of VMWare....that's should do it for sure!

Yes, I'd forgotten about that one, too!
 

Right now, I'm a little shell-shocked!! Just downloaded the latest binaries for Wine (I using SimplyMEPIS, which, as you probably know is now sharing repositories with Ubuntu), got it installed and tested a few small Windows-formatted utilities; some appeared to install fairly cleanly but none opened with a readable layout. The CD for the mailling-list program is being kept at another location, so it will be a while before I can actually test it. In the meanwhile, I'll check out your suggestion of VMWare; seems like I remember reading somewhere that they have a free version now. Thanks, again!

vmware
 

the free vmware is called vmware player

it works very nicley under linux. its only issue is that it cannot create new virtual machines on its own (not really an issue, they do that so you buy the workstation version.

It is possible to create vmware virtual machines with other free tools, and just use them in vmware player. I Think this would be an excellant solution for you, it works really well with my setup.


Just google around for a bit and it should be very easy to find everything you need.

Thanks for the info...
 

This sounds good. For the moment anyway, I'll probably 'thrown in the towel', pull the SATA hard drive with XP on it out of the drawer, and put together an XP machine tomorrow; I need to have a back-up ready for the animal-shelter office, anyway (until I can convert the manager to Linux :) ). Once I've got MyAdvancedMaillist caught up-to-date on the XP computer,for the next mailing, I can turn my attention back to the VMware Player possibility; I have another unused license and CD of XP that I can use. If I'm not being too nosy, what distribution do you use, which works well with VMware Player?

AdoptAPet, would you mind editing your posts to make them normal in typeface & size? Right now they are all large & dark or bold, to the point that they are visually assaultive -- to me they look ruder than the proverbial all caps.

I hope this is an innocent or unintentional beginner mistake.

Right now I can't stand to read more than a line or 2 at a time, which is unfortunate because your problem looks interesting.

Most office productivity software will have a function to do what you want. For example in Open Office dot org you would click on File, then click on Wizards, then click on Address Data Source. It will take addresses from many types of data sources such as text files, spreadsheets, dBase data files, and so on. Then you create a form letter. Then you use the mail merge function to print the letters and envelopes with the names and addresses of the people in your address data file.

Open up any office suite and look for the function "mail merge". Word processors have had this built into them since I started working with computers in 1985.

Check out DirectMailTk from Deepwoods Software. It is on the Odds and Ends page.

OP is probably long gone:

AdoptAPet is offline
Last Activity: 10-22-08 01:18 PM

Maybe this will help someone else.

BTW, why resurrect such an old thread? :)

Thank you and apologies...
 

Appreciate so much the email alert about Mr. Heller's posting. And my apologies for the bold and inordinately-large typeface size!! Yes, you're entirely right. I'm an old man (69) who seems to be forgetting more each day than I learned too long ago. I did check out the Deepwoods Software program in the Odds&Ends link, downloaded the Windows version the direct-mail addressing program, and tried to test it. But, lo, I could not figure it out; it's requiring an integration with SQL that I apparently can't achieve (something about "driver already in use"). This is probably a conflict with another program Joomla 1.6 which also integrates with SQL. I had been using Ubuntu 9.04 (because of the age and weakness of my notebook's resources), and I never could get Joomla and Xampp to install correctly, so I had to use Microsoft XP.

Eventually, I'll be able to save enough to have two notebooks, one for the necessary Windows programs and another for Linux. Maybe by then, some genius of a Linux developer will have created an easy stand-alone snail-mail addressing program.

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions!!!

Perhaps Im wrong...
 

but this sounds like something that could be handled by:

A text file
and
a shell script.

Other than exporting the address list to a text file, there would be little else involved other than having enuf envelopes in the printer...


If I can wrangle it, I'll work on something....

:D

Justboo2u, hello, and thanks for the thought; I'll bet you are right. Basically, the Animal Harbor mailing list consists of a spreadsheet with column headings designating the field which plugs into an address: Last Name; First Name; MI; Title; Street Address; City; State; Zip; and etc. In case there is more than one household member with a different name, there are fields for a secondary name, exactly like the primary. And also a field for an Organization or Company, if the individual represents the business. It would be great if there were a Linux program like the Microsoft Windows program, MyDeluxeMailList, but alas, for some reason no developer has seen a need. The beauty of a program like that is that it incorporates a 'form' format allowing a new mailing-list record to be filled in much easier than a spreadsheet. But you are right, I think. Importing a .cvs file of addresses from a spreadsheet and printing the addresses on a No. 10 envelope might be handled fairly easily by someone who knew how to write scripts.

Yes... so did DATASTAR. :rolleyes:
Pity all the good programs got tossed by the wayside just 'cause Microsoft wanted to 'steal things their way'... :p

No 2nd address line?

Its been awhile since I did any shell-scripting but I'll 'take a look at it'.
tab-separated might actually be a better export method... methinks. :D