email – Soluble Apps

MailShot Update 8.5: Attack Of The Clones*

The new version of MailShot and MailShot Pro addresses something only discovered recently, which is that some providers do not accept any email with an address repeated. Error messages from the providers never really explained the problem, and it was only detective work by a user which revealed it.

This could happen if, for example, a couple use the same email address with different names.

Mailshot already takes steps to prevent you adding an email address again, but there was a way you could add them both at once using the Contact Checklist.

The new update prevents you adding the same address in this way, and scans your groups to fix any cases where this has already happened.

* Yes, this is a Star Wars reference

Do more with MailShot

An update is being released for MailShot users this week, containing a number of new features to make life easier for our users. Here is a little about them, and how you might make use of them.

Place the group’s name in the subject line
Say your golf group is called “St. Margarets U20’s” that name will be placed in the subject line of any email sent to the group, so your contacts can see what the email concerns (you can still edit the title further, if you wish).

Enable “Group Name”, in Settings > Mailshot.

Add a text string at the bottom of each group email.
This text will be added above the signature line on every email you send through MailShot. This is useful to add something like “unsubscribe” instructions, or anything else you don’t want to include in your personal email signature.

Enter the text to use in “Text”, in Settings > Mailshot. To ask the app to interpret this as HTML (for web links, or formatting) enable “Add as HTML” on Settings > Mailshot.

Place an address in To: when you place a group in Bcc:.
Mailshot can automatically place your own address in the To line of Bcc emails, so it is not left blank (which causes “Undisclosed Recipients” to appear on some email readers.)

Enter your address in “To:” on Settings > Mailshot.

You can also omit contact names (With a change coming in the following update, this will allow you to also forward email from Outlook). And you can change which character is used between addresses, and to surround email addresses, and whether or not to include a carriage return when copying to clipboard. These tweaks are mainly for rare compatibility cases.

I hope you find these new features useful.

FAQ Email Composer 2.0 released

FAQ Email composer easily creates customer support emails for iPhone and iPad. Available now on the App Store.

We are proud to announce the release of version 2.0 of “FAQ Email Composer“, our unique app that helps you to easily create the perfect email.

The update provides a massive graphical refresh, with a much cleaner layout, and full compatibility with iOS 8.3. it also adds support for the larger screens of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus.

FAQ is ideal if you handle customer support, or provide information to a group of students, parents, sports teams. It works by holding all the blocks of text you may want to use to open and close emails and answer questions. Just select a couple of the blocks with checkmarks, and the email is created for you.

The new app is also available in a Markdown-optimised version, “FAQ: Markdown Email Composer”, now updated to feature a shortcut bar above the keyboard, for entering Markdown more quickly.

FAQ is an undiscovered gem, that always gets fantastic reviews from those who have tried it.

FAQ Email Composer works with iPhone 6+, 6, 5S, 5c, 5, 4s and 4, iPod touch, iPad and iPad mini, running iOS 7.0 and above, and is available now on the App Store.

“FAQ Markdown Email Composer” works with iPhone 6+, 6, 5S, 5c, 5, 4s and 4, iPod touch, iPad and iPad mini, running iOS 7.0 and above, and is available now on the App Store.

MailShot 3.7 Released

Today we released a new version of our popular MailShot Pro and MailShot apps on the App Store.

This update:

Fixes a rare issue, reported by around 20 of our 250,000 users, which identified group names as being a valid email address incorrectly.
Fixes the “Share” button pop-up on iPads (broken by changes Apple introduced in iOS 8.1.)
Adds a preview video for the App Store.

You can view the new video here, too:

As always, if you have any questions or issues you can usually find the answers in our User Guide or on the Support page.

If you enjoy using MailShot, it is always really appreciated if you could write or update a review on the App Store, as that helps others find out about the app. If you need any further assistance, please email us from the “Support” button on the title page of the app, and we will do our best to help.

MailShot Pro works with iPhone 6+, 6, 5S, 5c, 5, 4s, iPod touch, iPad and iPad mini, and is available now on the App Store.

MailShot works with iPhone 6+, 6, 5S, 5c, 5, 4s, iPod touch, iPad and iPad mini, and is available now on the App Store as a free download that can create up to 3 groups with up to 5 contacts per group. An in-app purchase removes those restrictions. No recurring subscription is necessary.

Mailshot 3.5- Bigger and better!

We have just released updates for our popular MailShot Pro and MailShot group email apps on the App Store.

The updates include:

NEW Optimisations for iOS 8, including 64 bit support.
NEW Support for the larger screens on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus.
NEW List or Print a group (see below)
NEW Case-insensitive comparison of email addresses- (i.e. “support@email.com” is now regarded as the same as “Support@email.com”)
NEW Prevent users creating blank groups, with no members
NEW Help message about the checklist feature, if a user adds more than 5 addresses by hand at once.
NEW Help message if user uses an email address as a group name.
FIX A rare bug if you exit the rename screen for a group without changing anything.

Occasionally we get asked for a way to send or print a list of people in a group, so we have added this (as an experimental feature.) Enabling a switch marked “Email Sharing Button” on the MailShot page in Settings, adds a share button to the menu bar of the group members page. Tapping that button creates an email containing the names and addresses of your group. You can then easily send, print, or copy and paste it.

The release was delayed a few weeks while we struggled to identify an issue introduced by iOS 8 that we now know only affects users using certain non-english characters in contact names, on devices set to non-english languages. We worked around the problem, but we see that Apple have also now fixed their bug with iOS 8.1.

We hope you enjoy the update. As always, you can find help on the Support page and in the User Guide. I that doesn’t solve your problem, please drop us a line from the Support button on the title page of the app if you have any problems and we will be happy to help.

MailShot Pro works with iPhone 6+, 6, 5S, 5c, 5, 4s, iPod touch, iPad and iPad mini, and is available now on the App Store.

MailShot Celebrates A Milestone With A New Update

To celebrate gaining over a quarter of a million users for our MailShot apps, we are proud to announce a new update to version 3.2 of MailShot Pro and MailShot, bringing enhancements for iOS7 and a new Automatic Sort feature.

To all those of you who have rated and reviewed the app, or spread the word to others about it. Thank you so much, we love you all, and if you find MailShot useful, we would really appreciate it if you could update your rating or review, so they can more easily be seen by people searching on the App Store.

UPDATE: An issue with restoring upgrade status in the new release, and a less-critical issue with sorting, were both fixed by a rapid update, 2 days later. Please ensure you have the latest version- 3.2.4

Here’s what has changed with this update…

iOS 7

The title page, icon and graphics have now been updated for iOS7, bringing a fresh, clean look to the app.

Group Naming

In the previous versions, email sent from the first person in a MailShot group might appear to have been sent from the group in iOS7 Mail.

This is now solved in the update. After updating the app, just tap the “UPDATE” button on each group.

Automatic Sort

We have now added an Automatic Sort feature, which sorts your group whenever you add a contact. This feature is enabled on the “MailShot” page of the “Settings” app.

We added this feature because we were surprised how many users contacted us after we moved the sort button in a previous update.

Thanks again. As usual you can find help in the User Guide and on our Support Page, should you need any further assistance, please drop us a line from the ‘Support’ button in the app itself, as that will tell us a little about how your device is configured, which will enable us to help you more efficiently.

MailShot 3.0 Brings A Fresh New Look.

We are delighted to announce the release of MailShot Pro 3 and MailShot 3, which brings a fresh new lick of paint and some exciting features that our users have asked for to the world-beating Group Email app, now used by over 230,000 people.

As usual, this will be a free update for our existing users.

We now have a new cleaner, flatter look, designed to fit with iOS7 (although you don’t require iOS7 to run it.)

A fantastic new feature is the ability to rapidly add a list of contacts, by pasting a string of addresses and contacts into the app.

You can read more about how to use this feature here in the User Guide, and you can also find a number of helpful hints and tips on how to extract email addresses as strings from received email, spreadsheets etc. here on our Support Page.

You can now easily duplicate a group. Tap “Edit” on the page where your groups are listed, then use the icons that appear on the right to drag a group onto the red bar at the bottom of the list to duplicate it.

And there are a couple of other changes that it may be useful for our existing users to know about…

Context sensitive buttons. To simplify things for new users, buttons for selecting and deselecting multiple contacts, and entering edit mode, are now only shown when relevant. Note that the automatic “sort” function IS still available, just tap the the “Edit” button on the contacts page to access it.

Manually-added contacts are no longer highlighted in red. This had obviously been confusing people, as we received a number of support questions about it. Now a contact will only appear in red if it was originally added from your address book, but is no longer found there.

A new search bar on the contact checklist lets you search on first name or email address, and only shows matching contacts. (we will add a search on company name in the next update, after requests)

The size of each group is displayed more simply on the groups page. It now shows just the size of the group, and will only show two numbers (such as “14 of 16”) when some members of a group are deselected.

There were also a number of other improvements:

• More tutorial information links within the app.
• Improved diagnostic information in the support request email.
• New share options to tell your Twitter and Facebook friends about the app.
• Updated to ARC and Modern Objective C standards.

We hope you enjoy the new features. Please let me know of any issues you spot, and we’ll do our best to help. If you wish to get in touch, please use the “Support” button on the title page of MailShot. Our Support Page and User Guide are also there, as always, to help.

MailShot Pro works with iPhone 5s thru 3GS, iPod touch and iPad mini, and is available now on the App Store.

MailShot works with iPhone 5s thru 3GS, iPod touch and iPads and is available as a free download that creates up to 3 groups with up to 5 contacts per group. An in-app purchase removes all restrictions.

New edition of FAQ released, with Markdown support

We are happy to announce the release of “FAQ Markdown Email Composer“.

This special version of our FAQ app is optimised to support the increasingly-popular Markdown text markup notation, allowing formatted text, lists, code samples and embedded weblinks in your emails.

FAQ is a unique app that stores all the bits of text you use most often in your emails- opening phrases, answers to the questions you get asked most often, and closing phrases, along with any images and diagrams you may need. This allows you to create the perfect email in reply to a common question in just a few seconds- ideal for customer support, or handling questions from students or group members.

The new version interprets all Markdown formatting in your text, and includes the ability to easily preview your marked-up text.

FAQ will continue to be available in both versions- FAQ and the Markdown edition, so you can choose the one which suits you best.

FAQ Email Composer 1.1- New Update (And A New Title)

We have just released an update for “FAQ“, our unique app that creates complete custom emails or text documents from your predefined text, in just a few clicks.

The new update adds iPhone 5 and iOS6 support, and the ability to duplicate entire topics, text and images. We have also retitled the app to “FAQ – Email Composer”- to give a clearer impression of what it does.

FAQ is great for customer support (and sees daily use here, answering user questions about our popular “MailShot” and “Shotlist” apps.) It is also fantastic for anything you may need to repeat often in email: such as instructions on how to reach your premises, boilerplate legal disclaimers, location details for grounds your team visits frequently, requests for donations, etc. It can really reduce the amount you need to use your device’s keyboard.

If you find it useful, as always, please spread the word. A review on the App Store is always much appreciated, especially after an update.