Plaxo e-cards suggestions

I was delighted to stumble on to the obviously very new Plaxo feature of e-cards this evening and tried it out immediately. After doing a major e-mailing of holiday cards tonight, I have a few suggestions for what is indeed a great addition. Thank you!

Here are some things I ran into you might consider as you further develop this feature...

1) It would be nice if you could tell me that the number of email addresses I can send the card to is limited (and tell me what the limit is...) at the beginning of the "send to recipients" process, not AFTER I have checked off a zillion addresses from my address book and then hit the "Send" button, only to receive an error message saying I tried to send it to too many.

2) Since I'm sending a holiday card to far more than the allowed number of email addresses, the only way to accomplish this that I could figure out was to re-create the same card several times and resend it to "chunks" of my address book such that the total number of emails attached to each card would not exceed the email address limits.

To do this, I had to re-create the card from scratch over and over, and send it each time to a different section of my address book (ABC, DEF, etc) monitoring the process manually. It was rather cumbersome!

First, it would be nice to have an option to re-send the same card multiple times without having to recreate it from scratch; second, perhaps you could come up with a better way to move through someone's address book if we are going to be stuck with the email address limits.

3) Other posters have asked to be able to see the names of who received the card. I concur. It would also be nice to be able to go back later and look at the cards I have sent. I can do this now by sending a copy to myself, but that copy will eventually be buried in the Inbox. Perhaps we could see cards we've sent in the past and to whom somewhere?

4) I understand the bounce-backs will not currently generate a notification to me of the fact that the email didn't get through, but you are working on it. That's good. This would be a helpful feature. I am not sure I would want to get an email confirmation of every card that IS delivered... perhaps this would be good to have as an optional feature?. In a large mailing, a confirmation email on each delivery would be too much.

Thanks so much for listening!

Hai,

Welcome to Plaxo Community Forums and thanks for your kind suggestions.

As of now a user can only be able to send an e-card to 15-20 contacts. There's a workaround on these issues and surely we'll inform you if it is implemented in our future versions of Plaxo.

So please be tuned...

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1) It would be nice if you could tell me that the number of email addresses I can send the card to is limited (and tell me what the limit is...) at the beginning of the "send to recipients" process, not AFTER I have checked off a zillion addresses from my address book and then hit the "Send" button, only to receive an error message saying I tried to send it to too many.

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I reported this early on - here (http://forum.plaxo.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=7304), and was told that this should not be happening. Later I saw a Plaxo post saying that there was a small bug that limited the number of recipients, but that they had fixed it. Now I just saw a Plaxo post that says we are limited to 15 or 20 cards.

I think that they do not know themselves.

Beautiful ecards....

Great concept...

Poor implementation thus far.

A few more suggestions after a couple of more days of using the new e-cards [I've been busy!]:

1) I LOVE the fact that you give me access directly into my Outlook address book. This is my overall favorite feature of your e-cards as every other program I have used requires re-typing of contact information, including email address, into screens on their website, and of course, do not automatically update as information changes. Yuck!

I LOVE the fact that you also give me access to each of the email addresses for contacts who have multiple email addresses in their record when identifying recipients of an e-card!

Now if you could possibly make it so that I could send to more than one of those addresses in a particular contact record on the same card it would be great. Currently it appears that I am limited to the choice of only one email per contact, then the contact name is no longer accessible and "greys out".
To work around this, I have figured out that I can go to the address box in "Edit Card" and manually type in a second name in quotation marks and the email address in brackets. [Hopefully, it is actually being received by all the emails by doing this, though I can't really be sure...]
There are lots of times when I would want to send a particular e-card to multiple addresses in the same contact record, eg. a couple who share the same contact record but have separate emails, or individuals with both home & work emails. etc. It would be a nice addition.

2) How about having the ability to sort the contact listing within e-cards by last name? Currently, it is sorted by first name only.

3) Here are a couple of other [crazy?] ideas that would truly set you apart from the rest of the pack in terms of the competition in the e-cards field:

a) One of the things I still cannot do on an e-card that I used to do with paper greeting cards is to include an attachment, for instance, the annual holiday letter attached to the holiday greeting card. Sure, I can send a separate email with an attachment such as a MS Word document, but it is... well... separate. Maybe you can call me crazy for suggesting this, and maybe it is, but I thought I would just mention it...

b) The other thing that it would be really great to figure out how to integrate is a checklist for the holiday cards. Personally, I keep a spreadsheet going back years that records, for each year, the people to whom I've sent cards, and from whom I've received cards. I also keep track of whether or not I attached the ubiquitous holiday letter. [Okay, okay, you can call me compulsive. It won't be the first time!!! ] Since we have a huge holiday greeting card list containing business and personal names, it's a great help. At any rate, since this sort of feature seems so close to other organizational tools you've created at Plaxo, I thought I'd bring this up too. To me [admittedly, an over-organizer], it would be the keystone that would truly free me from the duplicative aspects of the holiday card process. Again... just a thought!

Thank you for listening!

JMac001-
I took a look at the post you reference in your message:
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I reported this early on - here, and was told that this should not be happening. Later I saw a Plaxo post saying that there was a small bug that limited the number of recipients, but that they had fixed it. Now I just saw a Plaxo post that says we are limited to 15 or 20 cards.


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This thread notes that people with large address books, > 500 entries, might have problems. That would be me...

Hai Voulezvous,

I appreciate your interest with Plaxo thank you for suggesting those features. I sincerely take these into account and forward to our product development team. We value your feedback regarding our product. Again, thanks

Hi Voulevouz - You would love Constant Contact. Costs money but i can send great email newsletters to everyone on my contact list (2800 to date), they can opt-out or in, very professional and easy and cheap. Would love to have ecards be so simple and to do it right from Plaxo... but that's not happening yet. Till then, I'm sticking with Constant Contact (.com). Have fun!
Sally O'Boyle aka MacBird /images/graemlins/grin.gif

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Hi Voulevouz - You would love Constant Contact.

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Thanks, Sally! I will check it out!