Email – Soluble Apps

Mailshot updates add iOS 13, Dark Mode, Print, and Drag and Drop Support

We’ve recently released a number of updates for MailShot, to add a ton of new features.

MailShot now supports the system Dark Mode on iOS 13. (This can be enabled from the “Display & Brightness” page of the Settings app, or the Control Centre.)

You can now print a list of the members of any group to an AirPrint-compatible printer, (tap a group on the Groups page, then select “Print”)

We have wound back the minimum iOS requirement for the app to iOS12, as a number of longstanding users found that the App Store would not let them reinstall to older devices.

And our next update (in a day or so) will bring Drag and Drop to iPad…

This will allow you to run Mailshot side-by-side with Mail, and simply drag a group across into the To: or Bcc: line of an email. See our Support Page for more details, or this video:

We hope you enjoy the updates.

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.

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.

MailShot 2.0- Exchange, Android and More!

MailShot and MailShot Pro 2.0 are now available on the App Store. These are the latest in a long line of free updates to be released for our unique group email app since its launch last year, adding useful features each time.

Among other things, this update allows control over where your MailShot contacts are saved and introduces a new additional email format for compatibility with other platforms.

Select which address book to save to.

MailShot now saves its special group contacts to your default address book.

TIP: The default address book for your device is set on the “Mail, Contacts Calendars” page of the Settings app.

If you need more control over where your contacts are saved, you can select which address book types to use.

You can find more information on our support pages.

Exchange, Android and Google.

You can now store MailShot contacts in address books that are synchronised with an Exchange server. This simplifies a few things that tripped new users up, and allows you to synchronise MailShot group contacts to Android, Google etc.

You can use these group contacts to send email from Android devices, or from Google’s web mail. These extended features are provided as a convenience for our users, and your results may vary. Please do let us know if you encounter any problems or restrictions on use or group size when using this feature, so we can advise others.

TIP See these links for tips on using Mac Mail, iCloud.com and the GMail iOS app for other workarounds to send email to MailShot groups.

‘Standard’ email address format.

MailShot uses a special address format for compatibility with iOS Mail.

You can now also create an additional, “standard” email address for the group contact. This is enabled on the MailShot page of the Settings app.

This additional format will allow you to use MailShot groups in more places (but probably not Outlook, despite the name). Please let us know what does or doesn’t work for you.

NOTE: Take care to choose the correct address when you have two of them available. iOS is always listed first.

iCloud-based upgrading.

We now store the upgrade status for the free version of MailShot in iCloud.

If you install it to more than one device, a single in-app purchase upgrades them all (on iOS 5.0 and above.)

NOTE: Each group should still be managed from one device, and the contacts shared to your other devices.

Edit manually-entered contacts.

Just tap the contact in the list to edit its name or email address.

200-contact warning.

As more people create iCloud accounts, ‘me.com‘ addresses are becoming more popular. We have added an additional warning pop-up when a group exceeds 200 contacts, as this is the limit per email from me.com.

TIP: Any warnings that don’t apply to your email provider can be disabled on the MailShot page of the Settings app.

Confirmation before sort

We now ask for confirmation before a sort, as a number of users reported tapping the “sort” button when they didn’t intend to.

Retina Display

Icon and title page graphics have been updated for the new iPad retina display.

Minimum iOS version

The minimum iOS version has been raised from 3.0 to 4.0. We estimate that fewer than 1% of our existing users are still using iOS 3.0-3.2.

If you encounter any problems please let us know, as we are always very happy to help. Our Support page and User Guide are also always available for you whenever you need them.

If you find MailShot useful, a new or refreshed review on the App Store is always very much appreciated (this is really important to us after an update, as old reviews get pushed to other pages.) The “rate” button on the title page of MailShot is provided to make this easier for you.

MailShot Pro Sends Group Email Around The World

A new version of MailShot hits the app store today, adding support for French, Spanish and Chinese languages.

We are really excited to introduce MailShot Pro to a wider audience of French and Spanish speakers, and into China, one of the fastest-growing markets in the world. The worldwide reach of the App Store gives a small developer like us a global presence in markets that we simply couldn’t enter on our own.

You can now find localised support for MailShot in French, Spanish, Chinese and of course English.

This release also fixes an issue that a few users have experienced when naming their MailShot groups.

As always, if you find MailShot useful, a review on the App Store is always very much appreciated, as each new release tends to hide the fantastic reviews we have received so far.

MailShot Sails Past 50,000 Users!

It’s great to hear that we have just passed another milestone for “MailShot Pro” and “MailShot”, with over 50,000 users now enjoying our unique group email solution via the App Store.

We are celebrating with a new free update for both versions within the next few weeks, bringing larger groups for many users, better handling of in-app purchases, and more in-app help and error detection. We’ll let you know more about it when its available.

Thank you all for spreading the word about MailShot to others, its great to see how it has steadily grown more rapidly each month, and much of this has been by word of mouth.

If you need any assistance with MailShot, please see our support page or drop us an email, we’ll do our best to help you.

“FAQ” Makes Supporting Your Customers Easy.

FAQ, a unique new app to handle customer support on the iPhone and iPad was released today from Soluble Apps, developers of the popular “MailShot Pro” group email app.

The best apps are often those written to solve a need shared by their developer, as this means they can fully appreciate the problem they are trying to solve. “FAQ” is one such app, and was designed to answer user support questions quickly and efficiently (or for any other situation where you might want the elements you need to compose emails right at your fingertips.)

Since its original release at the beginning of the year, we have handled a fair bit of user support for our popular “MailShot Pro” group email app, and I like to think that the way we have done so has contributed to the reputation, and probably the review scores, that we have gained in that time. We try to treat each customer as an individual. Each enquiry reveals differing levels of supporting information, and user expertise, or asks a slightly different combination of questions, so we wouldn’t feel entirely happy just sending out a stock reply. But we also found that we are also repeating ourselves a lot, and doing far too much typing on our iPhone and iPad keyboards.

So we created FAQ, which makes its debut today on the App Store.

FAQ makes customer support much less repetitive. You use it to hold answers to all the most common questions you receive, along with reusable elements like opening and closing phrases, and supplemental information you might need (including images or web links). The items you select can be quickly combined into a response, ready to mail out, or copied to the clipboard, ready to paste back into a reply.

FAQ can also be used in many other situations where you may need to repeat information to customers, colleagues or pupils- such as warnings and disclaimers, instructions for finding your offices, stating office hours etc.

See the app page or support page/user guide for more information. Or find us on the App Store

UPDATE: This New video walks you through using FAQ for your customer support, and shows you it in action!

MailShot and iOS5

Upgrading to iOS5 brings a number of great new features to your device, including iCloud contact sharing, Documents in the Cloud, iCloud backup and Siri Voice Recognition. iOS5 is a free upgrade for all iPads, and all iPhones more recent than the iPhone 3G.

This post is about how these new features interact with the current versions of MailShot and MailShot Pro.

Migrating to iOS5 from iOS4.

Don’t forget to backup your device to iTunes manually as a safety precaution. (iTunes should do this for you too, but a backup is sensible.) Make sure that you select “restore from iTunes” after the upgrade and not “restore from iCloud”, this step restores the data for MailShot and your other apps as your data is not yet in the cloud. Take care not to unplug your device from iTunes until the restore process is complete.

In some cases apps may take a while to sync to your device wirelessly. If this doesn’t happen and you need to manually reinstall MailShot, please take care to get the correct version between “MailShot” or “MailShot Pro“, as the AppStore regards them as different apps and charges for them separately. See this entry for more on upgrading if you want to know more.

If you see a message about “no suitable address book” after upgrading, try enabling iCloud for contacts on your device.

If you have any other problems when changing to iOS5 see our support page, or drop us a line if you still can’t solve it and we’ll do our best to help.

Siri

Siri is the amazing new voice assistant (for iPhone 4s users only, at the moment) and, even more amazingly, we are happy to announce that you can use it to dictate and send an email to a MailShot group that you created. Simply say “send email to groupname” to Siri, using the MailShot group name just like a contact, and it will be sent to that group.

We are not aware of ANY other group email app on the Store that could work with Siri!

iCloud Contact Sharing

iCloud Contact Sharing will enable you to share MailShot contacts created on one device to others using the same iCloud account, wirelessly. Ensure that Contacts is enabled in the iCloud tab in Settings to use it

As everyone can now use iCloud.com to access their contacts, this makes it easy to create address book groups in the iCloud web apps if you have access via a PC or mac (something you could not do on your device with the default apps). If you create any groups in this way, you can quickly import them into MailShot using the “Import” button.

iCloud Backup

Once you have upgraded, your MailShot data will backup to the cloud automatically. The data itself is fairly small, so should not have much impact on the 5M of free storage that Apple give you.

Backup can be enabled and disabled from the Settings app under “iCloud”/ “Storage & Backup.”

Mail

Mail is gaining usability improvements such as the ability to format text using bold, italic and underlined fonts, and better control of indenting. You can still send mail to your MailShot groups from Mail, just as you did before, and take advantage of those new features.

Mail now allows you to drag contacts from one address line of an email to another (say, from “to:” to “bcc:”) this works with MailShot groups too, though you cannot move the individual contacts within a group around because the group is one person, as far as iOS is concerned.

Documents in the Cloud

Documents in the Cloud allows apps to sync data between multiple devices using the same iCloud account. However all apps need to be rewritten and have an update released to take advantage of it. Developer support is still scarce, but we plan to add support for this feature in an update before too long.

For now you can move data between devices manually if necessary using iTunes file sharing, but we still recommend that you only manage each group on one device, any contacts they create will synch to your other devices anyway.

Reinstalling Apps

The App Store makes it much clearer if you are reinstalling an app, as you can now bring up a list of the apps you have downloaded previously, and the button you would press to download in the App Store will also now say “install” instead of showing the price if you have already paid for an app. Hopefully this will prevent some of the confusion some users experience between MailShot and MailShot Pro, although it won’t help with in-app updates.

We have been using iOS5 for testing here for well over a month without too many nasty surprises, but please let me know of any changes, tips or problems you encounter with iOS5 with any of our products, and we’ll do our best to help you resolve your problem.

MailShot returns to the App Store with the best update yet

Over the past four months we have released five updates to MailShot, adding new features for our many thousands of existing users each time. The update released onto the App Store today marks the biggest change yet for most of our users- here is what it adds:

Quick Add For Contacts

When adding a contact with a single email address, MailShot will now automatically add that contact and return to the contact page in MailShot without needing you to select the address (if you would prefer to see a dialogue for confirmation, just disable “Auto-add contact” in the Settings app)

When you add or edit a contact with multiple email addresses, MailShot now pops up a dialogue showing all known email addresses for that contact. By toggling the checkmarks you can easily add, delete or exchange the addresses.

You can also now have MailShot automatically add all known addresses when adding or importing a contact with multiple addresses (enabled as “Auto-Add all” in Settings.)

Import Groups Into MailShot

This new feature lets you import an entire group into MailShot in one go.

If you already have conventional Groups set up in the address book on your device, tap the “Import” button in MailShot, and select the Group. MailShot will scan through the Group, automatically skipping over contacts with no email address, adding any unknown contacts with a single email address and allowing the user to choose which address to use for contacts with multiple email addresses (or to automatically add them all, if enabled in Settings)

You can re-import the group again at a later date to pick up any additions. (A user setting controls whether MailShot ignores contacts with multiple addresses that are already known, rather than prompting for an email choice again.)

If you have not upgraded MailShot yet, the usual limits apply to the maximum number of contacts in a group.

For more information on this feature, see this entry on our support page

Highlight obsolete contacts

To make it easier to keep MailShot in sync with changes in your address book, we now highlight any email addresses that aren’t found in your local address book in red when viewed in MailShot.

To keep MailShot as responsive as possible with larger groups, this status is only refreshed when MailShot starts up, and when you visit the contacts list for a group.

TIP To refresh the status for all the groups on the groups page at once, tap “Home” and then return to the groups page.

Don’t worry if you intentionally removed some or all of the original contacts for a MailShot group as part of your desired workflow. this isn’t a problem – MailShot will continue to work as before, despite the red text. (NOTE: This will also occur if you added a contact from a “Global Address List”, so it is not stored locally on your device)

Use more than 50 contacts in a group

A side effect of being able to import contacts from groups is that more users may now need the ability to manage larger groups than the current in-app upgrade allows, so we have removed the limit in MailShot. Of course you will still be at the mercy of any limits your email provider may impose for a single email (I hear that Google set their limit at 100, for example).

Its Good To Be Back

This release fixes an issue with the update early last week that affected a minority of users using Exchange Wireless Synch.

As soon as we discovered the issue we pulled MailShot from the store, before most users upgraded, and prepared this new version for release. Big props to the Apple approvals team for testing and approving this update for us inside a week. Thanks for that!

Help Us To Help You

We hope you enjoy the new features, but every time that we update we lose all the fantastic comments you have made in the past, so we would ask that you please support us by rating and reviewing the new version on the App Store if you can, and helping to spread the word about MailShot so we can keep the updates coming in the future. Please let us know on our support email address if there is anything you’d like to see in those future versions.

If you haven’t tried MailShot yet, where have you been? It’s currently free to try on the App Store. Head over there and try it now, to see what you’ve been missing.

Mailshot 1.30 Update Released On The App Store

A new update for Mailshot hit the App Store this morning. Version 1.30 brings a number of improvements to the contacts screen, based on user experiences and your feedback:

We now show email addresses alongside the names for each contact, this will help distinguish them if a contact has multiple email addresses in a group.
Previously MailShot was unable to add a contact without an actual name being defined for them in the addressbook. We now use the contact’s email address as their name if there isn’t one set up.
We added a “sort” button to quickly alpha-sort contacts in a group (note that any contacts with an email address for a name will come last, as lower case letters are higher in the alphanumeric series than capitals).
Improvements to memory management and stability.

I have added some code which may prevent the occasional crashes experienced when adding “malformed” contacts to a group (we cover this issue in detail on the support page.) If it still occurs to you on the new version, please email to let us know. We would like to hope its gone, but confirmation either way will be useful. I’ll edit this post if we no longer need it.

And the next time?

We would love to hear your suggestions for the next update, I think among other things I will be looking at how we handle contacts with multiple email addresses next time, but I will be listening for your suggestions.

Is anyone using the “use semicolon as separator” feature we added with 1.20, or should we remove it?- it has been the source of a number of support calls from people with it enabled in Settings (they found only one person in their MailShot group was receiving their emails) Please let us know if you need it to stay, or its days are numbered.

A final request

As always, one of the problems with updating frequently is that we lose the good reviews people have been kind enough to leave, so if you get the chance we would really appreciate it if you would stop by the App Store and refresh your old review, or add a new one if you haven’t done so before. Thanks.

Welcome To Our First 5000 MailShot Users.

Apple tells us that we now have over 5000 users of Mailshot out there from our first few weeks on the App Store. We do hope you are all finding the unique way you can now send mail to multiple people easily from within your applications useful. You should find that it is something you are able to benefit from whenever you need it, month after month.

We love to hear from you. Whether its to ask for help, to suggest features we could add, to pass on a tip for other users, or just to tell us how MailShot is working out for you- Please do get in touch.

Much of our success so far has come from people spreading the word through social networks and forums and contributing reviews to the App Store. My heartfelt thanks go out to all those that have done this already, its much appreciated, and please let it continue so that we are soon welcoming the next 5000 to the fold.

Peter

Some Unusual Ways To Use MailShot

The unique way MailShot creates groups in your iPhone address book that act like single contacts brings a number of benefits. Don’t feel you can only use MailShot for large groups, there are a number of other uses out there you may not have considered…

Like me, you may have more than one way of communicating with the world in addition to email. I have this blog to feed, and both personal and commercial accounts for Twitter and Facebook. Most of these services offer an email address to allow you to post by email, so why not collect them in a MailShot group or two? Then you can post to all your work-related accounts, all your personal accounts, or both at once just by choosing the appropriate contact.
Some friends or colleagues can be difficult to get hold of, using different email addresses at work and at home.You can create groups for them that email all of their addresses at once to ensure that when its important, they get the message.
If someone doesn’t usually carry an email-capable phone you can still include them in a MailGroup.Most US carriers provide an equivalent email address that gets converted into an SMS text message for their users, and you can add those addresses into your groups too (first add them as an email address for your contact, then they are available to add in MailShot). You can find a list of email addresses for a number of carriers on Wikipedia here .
This one was inspired by a question on the Apple user support forums where a mother wanted to ensure that her daughter copied her in on all emails to her teacher. Use MailShot to create a contact containing both mother and teacher’s addresses, and delete the original teacher’s contact from the address book. Now whenever the teacher is selected as the addressee for an email, mum gets one too. (though obviously this won’t help if the daughter is replying to an email from the teacher)

These are just a few suggestions for you, we’d love to hear of any interesting or unique ideas for how you use MailShot- please drop us a line on suggestions@solubleapps.com