Controlling internally-generated spam is a problem that faces Notes administrators in any large company. Using NAB (Name and Address Book) groups unwisely, a Notes user can wind up sending a message intended for a small audience to a very large distribution. The result is overloaded servers, crammed disk drives, red faces, and worse.

The flip side of that problem comes from the need to provide an efficient means for authorized users to send mass mailings on demand. These usually emanate from the corporate human resources department or upper management. The objective is to be able to easily reach the target audience without overloading servers. An additional objective is to provide security over who can send such mass mailings.

Connectria's GroupCast (at http://www.connectria.com/lotus/groupcast.cfm) is a tool to manage mass mailing in large companies. It's a stand-alone Notes database that manages the creation and sending of messages as well as the security to limit who can send messages to various distributions. The GroupCast database must be located on a server.

How it works
GroupCast works on the basis of two kinds of profile documents, one that defines senders and one that defines distributions. When messages are sent, one sender profile and one distribution profile is selected and combined with the desired message.

A "User Access" document, the first kind of profile, establishes the name of a "message sender" and sets which Notes users may send mail on behalf of the sender. The name of the sender could be someone in the public Name and Address Book, but it doesn't have to be. Sender names could be "Human Resources," "The Office of the President," or something similar. One nice feature of GroupCast is that the emails go out with the message sender's name (not that of the Notes user) in the "From" field.

The User Access document also sets the Notes letterhead that will appear in the message, the delivery priority, and, if desired, a size limitation for outgoing messages. Any number of User Access documents may be created, each defining a different message sender, and each having a different list of authorized Notes users.

A "Group Profile" defines a distribution for messages. The Group Profile is given a name and a list of Notes users authorized to send to this distribution. For each Group Profile, one and only one of four distribution mechanisms may be selected. They are: