MRX Tour
This section will give you a short tour of MRX by way of some typical screenshots. (Click on a screen shot to magnify)
MRX is administered using the MRX Client Application that runs under either Mac OS X or Windows. The application works in conjunction with the MRX Server to permit users to add company and contact details to their MRX Business Directory and to create and edit mailshots.Existing databases of company and contact details can be imported or automatically synchronised to the MRX Business Directory.
Most users, however, will simply wish to access the Business Directory and Mail Database on a read-only basis and for those users, there are 3 easy ways to do this.
1. Their existing Mail client
2. A Web Mail client
3. The MRX Web application
Existing Mail Client
The simplest way to view archived mail is via an existing Mail Client product such as OS X Mail or Microsoft Exchange. Any mail client can be used provided it supports the IMAP protocol. IMAP allows mail to be filed into server-based folders, which are created by MRX under the names of companies in the MRX Business Directory. The screenshot below shows an OS X Mail account with access to the MRX mailbox.
Web Mail Client
The screenshot below shows the same view of the MRX mailbox but made via a Web client served by the MRX Mail Server. The benefit of using a web client is that it can be run on any computer that has a browser, anywhere in the world. In the screenshot below, Firefox is being used.
MRX Web Client
Users can also access the MRX Mail Database via a specially developed MRX Web application. This has an extremely simple-to-use interface that provides a very fast capability for searching and sorting mails as well as download attachments. It is based on open technologies such as MySQL, PHP and Java.
MRX Administrator Application
The MRX Client Application provides the most comprehensive information about the storage of each mail as well as full facilities to manage the Business Directory and mailshots. Note that some of the screenshot examples show “bespoke” fields that have been added to the basic schema. The Administrator application is required to set up and run mailshots.
MRX Administrator Application: Correspondence list
This screenshot shows the last 30 days correspondence but is able to search or sort the whole mail archive using almost any arbitrary criteria.
MRX Administrator Application: Company details
The contact and email data relating to a company can very easily be updated or viewed using the Company Detail form. This is a tabbed layout where users can access related contact, correspondence (email) and optionally, journal data. The journal is a log of every record change within the MRX database and is invaluable for auditing database modifications.
MRX Administrator Application: Contact details
The contact detail form includes all contact details as well as a log of the correspondence sent to a contact. The form provides one way to assign attributes to individual contacts for subsequent mailshots. As can be seen, each contact record supports multiple email addresses and telephone numbers.
MRX Administrator Application: Mailshot Browser
Mailshot Management forms a complete subsystem within MRX. Users access the Mailshot system via the Mailshot Browser. This allows creation of a new campaign or change to an existing campaign.
MRX Administrator Application: Mailshot Setup Tab
Each mailshot campaign is managed from one form with 4 tabbed pages. The Setup tab provides the basic details of the mailshot. The user may choose between, labels, letters (headed or plain), Fax (optionally) and emails. Emails may be plain text (with or without attachments) or embedded html. In all cases, special MRX tags may be used to substitute database field (e.g. Contact name) at run time. Options are provided to: 1. Override bulk mail header – Mailshot mails are normally designated “bulk” and as such are not duplicated many times in the mail archive. 2. Override Do Not Disturb contact attributes – allows 3. Skip sent records – this is useful when mailshots are aborted. It prevents the same mails be being resent if the original contact selection is re-used. 4. Skip generic contacts – this will not send mail to generic contacts, for example “The Accounts Department” 5. Trickle mail with a delay – this is to allow large campaigns to be staggered and hence manage the response and not overload the mail server.
MRX Administrator Application: Mailshot Builder Tab
The mailshot builder allows non-technical staff to design and test individual campaigns. The mailshot builder adopts a simple yet universally acceptable structure to build an html mailing comprising a Document heading field, a Document sub-heading field followed by an unlimited number of sections. Each section comprises a section heading, text and a picture – each of which are optional. (More detail follows on the Mailshot Section Builder).
The overall layout is governed by an html Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). The CSS does, of course, require expertise to set up initially but once constructed can be used time and again. Typical CCSs will be Newsletters, Christmas cards, Invitations, etc.
MRX Administrator Application: Mailshot Section Builder
The mailshot section builder is identical of each mailshot section. The example below is simply a “Contents” page for the rest of the mailer. The MRX tags [[sect]] are used to create links to subsequent sections. The image, originally stored on the users workstation, is resized and sent to the MRX web server, so that the mailshot can be run from any client workstation without relying on local data.
The second example of a section contains more descriptive text. An interesting addition is some html required to solicit an email from the reader.
Because links and mailto tags are so commonly required, MRX provides two buttons that correctly format the html without requiring specialist html expertise. Below is an example of the Mailto dialogue:
Of course, given their level of expertise, the user is always free to add html as required.
MRX Client Application: Mailshot html Sourc tab
The third tab on the Mailshot builder is to allow easy testing the generated html. The can rebuild the html resulting in any changes to sections. The resulting html can be inspected (if required) and even manually edited. From this point, there are 3 options 1. View html in Browser. This gives an immediate indication of the graphic layout of the mailshot. Of course, no tag substitutions are made since no recipient contact has been designated. 2. Email to me. This provides fully personalised mailing back to the user, so that the personalisation (Tag substitution) can be checked. 3. Email to proofers. Contacts may be designated as “proofers” and they will receive the mail for proofing.
The “log” tab (not shown) gives a log of all the recipients of this mailshot. Every time the mailshot is re-run this log will be extended.
Example Mailshot
The previous example, gives rise to the following JPY Newsletter which commences thus:
Preferences
All company-specific information is abstracted into a preferences table. This allows for totally distributed archiving across geographically dispersed servers – greatly enhancing the security and resilience of MRX.
