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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.

Welcome to our first 10,000 MailShot Users.

We have just heard from Apple that over 10,000 people are now using MailShot after its first few months on the App Store. We hope you are all finding the unique way you can send mail to groups from within your applications useful, especially with the new features we just added in our most recent update. You will find that it is an app you can continue to benefit from, month after month.

We always love to hear from you. Please get in touch to tell us how you are using MailShot, to request features you’d like to see, or to ask for advice or help with a problem.

We have just produced a comprehensive User Guide, so take a look if you haven’t seen it yet, you are bound to learn something. You can also still find advice and many answers to the most common user questions on our support page.

It’s great to see how MailShot continues to grow, and we plan to continue to support it with updates in the future (we have updated five times already!). 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.  Many thanks go out to all those that have done this, it’s always appreciated. If you haven’t, please review us if you get the chance, as all the great reviews we have received so far are harder to find when we put out an update.

Thanks again. We hope it won’t be too long before we are welcoming the next 10,000 users.

MailShot 1.40 Released- Now You See It On The App Store, Now You Don’t!

Monday 17th May– Just after update 1.40 went live, we learned of a possible issue affecting some users using Exchange for wireless synch of contacts. As we don’t want our Exchange-using customers to receive an undesirable update, and there is no way to roll back a version, we have temporarily suspended Mailshot sales from the App Store. We apologise for the inconvenience, but it is the right thing to do. We’ll be back very soon.

Tuesday 18th May– A new version was submitted to Apple earlier today. We’ll be back on the Store as soon as it’s approved. If you use Exchange Wireless Synch and are getting crashes, please see this page for our recommended workarounds.

If you need early access to version 1.41 to solve a pressing need or would simply like the opportunity to participate in it’s development, please drop us a line and ask to join our free test program, we have a few spaces available.

Monday 23rd- “We’re ba-ack!???” The new version of MailShot is in its final testing stage at Apple. I hope we’ll have good news in the next few hours. See this post for a full run-down on the exciting features in the new update.

In The Works- Exciting New Features For MailShot

I know a lot of you are enjoying using MailShot for group email within your favourite apps right now, but we still keep striving to make it an even better experience for you.

We thought you might be interested to hear about some of the fantastic additional features we have been working on for the next free update to MailShot (1.40), which is due to hit the App Store in a week or so’s time.

  • Fast selection of contacts with multiple email addresses (using checkmarks)
  • Import existing address book Groups into MailShot* (!)
  • Highlight redundant email addresses that no longer exist in your address book
  • Manage over 50 contacts in a MailShot group (with the upgraded version)

MailShot will remain free to try on the App Store until the update. If you haven’t tried it yet, what are you waiting for?

App Store Reviews, Part 3 (in 3D!*)

Now that version 1.30 of MailShot has been out for a few weeks I thought it was time for another roundup of user reviews around the world’s App Stores.

In general they are fantastic, thanks to you all for your kind words. As usual we also include the few isolated negative ones we have had, with our responses- in most cases we could probably have solved their problems if they had contacted us on our support page.

If you are already a satisfied user please take the time to add your opinion and rating on the App Store. We need and value your support, especially each time a new version is released as this hides the previous good reviews on another page.

USA Store

FatherWarrior *****
Group emailing FINALLY!
It works perfectly on my iphone4. Upgrade to pro version is totally worth the $3.99, if you have large email groups like I do. iOS should have had this feature from the beginning. Apple will probably buy this app’s code and call it their own like they usually do.

PJ- I wish!

Well, they know where to find me…

Nashville JZ *****
Great
As promised. Simple. Easy to manage. Works like a charm.

Ddlj81 *****
Very useful
Does what it says. Just that the free version can only store 5 max on a group.

Bronzit *****
Excellent ‘Gap’ Filler!
Works very well. Easy to use, in The Mac Way. I expect Apple to make it obsolete, soon, though.

CatkissinAustin *****
Just what I needed
I’m not a tekkie and I don’t speak Mac altho I have a Mac and iPhone. This worked easily and quickly for me.

Dakota Roemer****
Well Done!
This sucker keeps me sane. A very well executed and much needed app. Woot!

Yptcn *****
GREAT !!!
The app that was missing . It does everything it says.Thank you :-)))))))))

pinki101 *****
Now Even Better
This is just about the most important app I’ve purchased. Lots of apps let you email to groups from their apps, but this is what you need to forward easily forward email to your groups from the mail app. It’s simple, it’s smart, and it works. I rated it five stars before the last round of improvements, and now with sort ability and both emails and names showing for edit, it’s that much better. Thank you!

EuRisk0 *****
Perfect iPhone add on
Great job

Schreibs1 *****
A must-have for productivity
This app works seamlessly when following the web support page. I now have email group function on my iPad. Previously, I was relying on my PC for emails to over 10 groups. I maintain my zero stars rating to Apple for not building in this function.

PJ- It was great to see a reviewer who only awarded us a single star in an earlier review because “the functionality should have been provided by Apple” come back and change it. Much appreciated, thanks.

Mkirse *****
Thank YOU!!
I’m thrilled to find this app!! This issue has been driving me crazy – can’t believe that apple didn’t include the ability to forward emails to a group themselves. Now my iPad is finally a functional tool for my business on the go. Thank you!!!

IncredulousAlien ** v1.20
Good effort, but . . .
This app has some potential, so I gave it a two rating. And yes, it does have the currently unique ability to use group lists for forwarding email. Unfortunately, there appears to be no method for “on the fly” deletion of addresses from a group (e.g., in the process of adding a group to the bcc: field when forwarding in Mail). This means that, in cases where the incoming “from” address happens to be included in the group selected for forwarding, the email will be sent back to the incoming “from” address. Not useful, and certainly not polite in an age of humongerous attachments and bulging inboxes. This may not be a flaw for some uses, but it is a fatal one for the way I use email. Bottom line: I wish I had my money back.

PJ- Slightly over-the-top criticism, perhaps, and the functionality IS actually provided for this if you are concerned enough about it to want to deselect people from an email. (Use the checkmarks provided in MailShot to temporarily deselect a person from the group, press UPDATE, send your email to the group, reselect the person and press UPDATE again.)

Bob Kroghs ***** v1.20
Great app.
Once I took the time to read instructions carefully it worked perfectly. Took a half hour to learn.

Craig Symons ** v1.20
Not bad but crashes constantly
After entering addresses and it crashing, I finally ended up entering one address and updating each time for a total of 25 updates. Then going back to find out how to send an email I noticed that nearly ALL of my entries were gone. Very frustrating!!

PJ- Always sorry to hear it when a user has an experience like this. From the description it sounds like an issue we have seen occasionally when adding badly-formatted contacts in the address book (often created in MS Outlook). Some code we added in 1.30 seems to have helped with this, but if this user had contacted support or read the support page I am sure we would have been able to help him.

bakerbear ***** v1.20
Free version gave me great idea of how it worked.
I will feel much better about emailing groups now… No one forgotten, no one included without need. App works smooth and has great help page (I had one contact w some nonstandard entries that were easily fixed). Didn’t take more than 1 minute to be fully working!!

Woogetybop ****
MailShot
Simple free app that is really $3.99 if it going to be functional. After paying the $3.99 it let’s you create 50 groups of 50 contacts that can be used with most other app’s. That’s the key here. Most other mail contact apps make you use their emailer, which I find unacceptable. 4 stars for being a simple program, needs more options like CC BCC in contact groups.

PJ- Actually you CAN place MailShot groups in the BCC and CC lines, just as easily as the TO line.

Also, apparent “simplicity” is actually an aim for mobile apps and one of the hardest things to achieve. We often work hard behind the scenes to hide the complexities from the user. I guess I’ll take it as a compliment, not a criticism :).

Penta Huang *****
Good 
I just download, very good embedded to iPad mail app

UK Store

Andrez_99 **
Poor
Incredibly frustrating that you can only add one contact at a time from the address list to a group. This app needs a tick box next to those address names with emails. You then want to add all of those ticked.

PJ- Actually this feature is already coded and will be added in the next update- (1.40)

DWoodthorpe ****
Great help
This app is just what I have been looking for. I can now email all my golfing group in one go. I would give it 5 stars if I could have had more than 5 members per group. 10 would have been more realistic for the free version.

This facility should have been part of the mail program from the start. Well done.

PJ- I do make my living from writing software, and it takes some considerable time for us to support users and add features to MailShot even now, months after the release. I needed to set the user limit to one which will let people try it out for free and see its advantages, but will also give them a reason to pay a small upgrade fee if they like it and want more. Around 20% of our users upgrade, so I think that means we have the balance about right, as it is a lot higher than figures I have heard for other apps.

Unfortunately I think people can interpret the “free” download icon as meaning completely free, rather than “free to try”. It would be nice if Apple could change that. 

Tim, Scotland *****
Brilliant App
This is a brilliant app and just what the iPad was waiting for. It enables you to create Groups in your Contacts list and access these from within the iPad’s email app. The Groups appear in your Contacts list as a single entry (say ‘Family’), but contain multiple email addresses. So, when you’re in the iPad’s email app, just select ‘Family’ from your Contacts list (remember, it looks just like a single email address in the contacts list) and your email will be sent to multiple recipients. Best of all, when you look at your sent mail, you’ll see all the recipients listed separately. You can edit existing MailShot groups from the app – say adding or deleting members individually.
The basic app is free to let you evaluate it for a few small groups, but an in-app upgrade (very reasonable) releases the full potential (up to 50 groups with up to 50 members per group). An absolute must-have.

David Hillyer *****
Wonderful x 2!
It’s great to see a new version created so quickly in response to user feedback. I stand by my earlier posting on v.1.13 even more:
I love my IPhone, and find I’m doing more and more emailing from it. To not
have a group email-send was a problem. So finding MailShot was great . But
in the v1.13, I had problems upgrading for 5+ names. I contacted Peter,
who then appeared to work night and day to fix the problem – I felt as
though I was at the cutting edge of app development! We got it sorted, and I
am very pleased.
I’ve seen a few negative comments from users – all I can say is that I guess
in the early stages apps may need a bit of tweaking; so my advice would be
to make contact with the designer, rather than moan about things online. And
as for criticising the cost: an app costs peanuts, and they can be very
powerful tools. MailShot certainly is one of my best buys!

Canadian Store

Sd37lafont *****
Mailshots
Amazing the way they organize the address book of contact from all sources.

garyludwig ***** v1.20
Exactly what it should be
I’ve been looking for an app that would let me make email groups on my iPhone I could use in all my other apps. This one is exactly right — just what I wish Apple had built in. Simple, intuitive, and versatile. The graphics make it look cartoonish but don’t be fooled.

PJ- Cartoonish? I was aiming for non-threatening :).

I am also a fan of Rene Magritte, and subconsciously had some of his recurring themes in mind. He had more than 72*72 pixels to work with, though.

Rest Of World

Florian Prelle ***** Germany
Super 
Fantastic app to create mailing lists

David BOULANGER **** France
Great
Great ! but expensive ….

JRK1 **** Australia
MailShot
Brilliant app and great support service, much appreciated.

* And if you are wondering why “in 3D?” its simply because this is a sequel to a previous post, and in eighties cinema the third part of a franchise was often in 3D, unlike now when it seems to be on nearly every new release, whether it needs it or not.

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.

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

MailShot 1.13 Live on the App Store

A new update has just been released for MailShot on the App Store which should bring greater mail server compatibility for many people. To find out more about MailShot please visit its page here.

Meanwhile here is our handy guide for people updating from the first version:

It is a good idea to first delete your existing MailShot groups from your address book using the Contacts app. (Delete from Contacts and not MailShot, then you won’t need to rebuild them all in MailShot.)

You may find the quickest way to find them all is to search for “MailShot” in the contact search bar.

We delete the old contacts because we need to rewrite each contact group from MailShot to benefit from the update. to do this simply select each group in turn in MailShot and press UPDATE to rewrite it in your address book.

You will notice some changes in appearance of the MailShot groups – the first person in the group will now show the group name (or a version of their email address if you send from Contacts) in the email header. This change was necessary to increase compatibility for different mail servers as your message travels around the internet.

Generally we would now suggest that you should use Mail, or the many other apps that use its code, in preference to Contacts. MailShot has now been optimised for Mail because there are so many unique tricks you can do with it that you can’t do from Contacts, such as forwarding a mail direct to a group or using BCC to protect privacy.

You may find Contacts still works for you, in which case fine. If this changeover causes you a problem compared to before, please drop us a line and we’ll consider adding a switch for “contacts-only” behavior in a future version.

Another change is that the title screen now has buttons to reach this website for user support, and to make it easy tell people about the app by email or rating us on the App Store. If you enjoy MailShot please spread the word, but if you have a problem, please tell us and we’ll do our best to help. We have put lots of helpful information on our Support Page for you.

One last word is just to thank our “Test Pilots”, who helped test the app before release. Cheers guys (and girls.)

Welcome to our first 1000 users

I see from Apples’s stats pages that we got our first 1000 MailShot users last Thursday, in just under a week. Welcome to you all, and I hope you find MailShot as useful as we think you will.

If you like it, do please spread the word, if you have any problems or suggestions then please let us know and we’ll try our best to help.

App Store Reviews

There are a few reviews coming in from our first week on both the largest App Stores, so I will show them here, as its tricky to see reviews from other territories. I’ll also take this opportunity to respond to the one negative one I saw posted.

If you have a problem with getting the app up and running, do please check out our support pages, they are there to help you. If that doesn’t work, do please get in touch so that we can help you, rather than just posting a negative review. We are always happy to help.

Also, if you find MailShot as useful as we think you will, please do spread the word by rating or reviewing it in the App Store, it is much appreciated. Our heartfelt thanks go to those that have already done so.

US Store

Mailshot  *****
by sportsdave

A life saver….i use my IPad extensively for email when not at home. Unfortunately I could not add “groups” to my contact list on the IPad. How frustrating!

Then I found Mailshot and my problem was solved. it is a very easy application. I now have more than 15 email groups, ranging from 5 addresses to 30. It is awesome.

Another loser app *
by Ldz

You must have written the only review. The free does nothing but create a group. Doesn’t show up in mail when sending mail.

PJ>
I included this here as it may help others to show what this guy did wrong. Unfortunately we cant respond to reviews in the App Store to help him. Two possible things fit his symptom from his short description. Either

a) He is looking in the wrong addressbook when he looks for the new contact- He should use “All Contacts”, or just start typing the MailShot group name into the “To” field and it will show up.

or b) He isn’t pressing UPDATE to write the contact group to his address book.

Hopefully the walkthrough I have now added to the support page will help others like him.

Finally! *****
by pinki101

Don’t know what the previous reviewer did wrong. This groups issue has been one of my biggest frustrations with the iPad. I just created a trial group, and tested it from the mail program. Worked perfectly.

The group also shows up in my contacts from the contact app. I can now get rid of all my other apps that have less elegantly tried to deal with this shortcoming in the mail and contacts apps. Thank you!

Now all I have left to complain about is Flash.

UK Store

It’s grrrreat!  *****
by Big Tithe

The best thing since sugar-coated cornflakes. Seriously, it’s that good, I was left wondering why it isn’t standard functionality. A must have!

Brilliant App *****
by Tim Scotland

This is a brilliant app and just what the iPad was waiting for.

It enables you to create Groups in your Contacts list and access these from within the iPad’s email app. The Groups appear in your Contacts list as a single entry (say ‘Family’), but contain multiple email addresses. So, when you’re in the iPad’s email app, just select ‘Family’ from your Contacts list (remember, it looks just like a single email address in the contacts list) and your email will be sent to multiple recipients. Best of all, when you look at your sent mail, you’ll see all the recipients listed separately.

You can edit existing MailShot groups from the app – say adding or deleting members individually. The basic app is free to let you evaluate it for a few small groups, but an in-app upgrade (very reasonable) releases the full potential (up to 50 groups with up to 50 members per group). An absolute must-have.

MailShot- Support page enhanced.

Now that MailShot is on the App Store we have been receiving the occasional support email. I am very pleased to say that we have been able to help everyone out so far.

We added an illustrated walkthrough to our MailShot Support page today to help get people started, and a few more support questions and answers to the list, based on the questions asked in that first week.

Do check it out, but don’t hesitate to get in touch if you still need help.