Not all emails are sent from MailMerge

Yesterday I looked at an issue with a colleague of mine (Nico Verhagen). The problem was that a mailmerge quick campaign has been created which should send out approximately 1500 emails. When the quickcampaign had finished, there were only 43 emails sent and nothing failed. How could that be true?

Apparently only 800 contacts had an email address specified, so that already is causing half of the issue. The second half was harder to find, especially because there was no error message anywhere.

The root cause of this issue appeared to be that the bit field for 'donotsendmm' has been set to NULL. Although the default is 'yes', the field had no value because the records were created in an import program instead of the UI. In this import program the default values were not set for the 'allow marketing' attribute. After setting the allow marketing to true, the emails were sent.

Hint: To update all the records in bulk on a supported way, Nico created a workflow rule which updates that field to set it to true. Then perform an advanced find to select the records for which the field has not been set to false and run the workflow on all the records on the page. You will then update 250 records in each run. You can set the record amount visible in your personal options in CRM.


Anonymous said...

Why creating a workflow for updating one field? Bulk edit feature would do the same job with less effort.

Bertil said...

Hi Ronald,
For CRM 3.0 there's a default tool (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?DisplayLang=en&FamilyID=3570fdaa-4ceb-44b5-b815-a52a1a6e9df1) that you can to accomplish just that: setting the default values of bit/picklist fields that have null values.
Do you by any chance know of a same tool for CRM 4.0 in the near furure?

Ronald Lemmen said...


Bulk edit is an option as well, but we used the workflow because you will not have to wait until all the records are updated. After firing the workflow, the update will be done asynchonously. You will have to set up the workflow once, but after that the process is faster.

I guess Microsoft will not create one because it is solved in their webservice in CRM 4 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc151061.aspx). This means that the records in your database which have null values instead of defaults are a leftover of a migration from crm 3.0.

Kind regards,

Always learning said...

Hi Ronald

When email replies are tracked in CRM,an activity is created for the user.The problem is the duration field(Actual and scheduled) remains blank.

I tried running a workflow it didnt work,maybe the activity was created by the system.

Look forward to your reply.

Warm regards

Ronald Lemmen said...

Hi Saurabn,

Are you using CRM 3.0 or CRM 4.0? If you're using CRM 3.0, then youc an use the default tool as mentioned by Bertil.

Otherwise you could try a plug-in.

Could you let me know if any of these work?