July 13, 1998 by Brandon Miquel SRP: $99.00 Galleon Software eMerge Upgrade to 1.5.3 Pros: infinitely customizable, easy to use, simple yet powerful Cons: limited to 10 variables      When people hear about mass e-mailers, they immediately relate that to the unpleasent idea of of spam. After all, most people don't like receiving spam, so who would want to be responsible for it? eMerge was created with a completely different purpose in mind, and is no better for sending spam than a regular e-mail program is; it simply offers unique and powerful features that legitament mass mailers will appreciate. The personal touch      eMerge allows the user to send a single message to an entire mailing list of people with certain parts of the message customized for each person who receives it. This is accomplished by inserting variable references into the text of the message, which are later replaced with the actual variable contents for each recipient when the message is sent out. In essence, it allows you to send out an e-mail form letter.      Composing an e-mail with eMerge is a simple process. You type the e-mail as you would any other message, but when you want to use a value that is stored in a variable, such as the recipient's name or address, you select the appropriate variable from a pop-up menu and then continue typing. You can have up to 10 user-defined variables per recipient, as well as the name, title and e-mail address of the recipient. If you do not assign a variable a value for a particular person, then no text appears in that place for that person and they won't know the difference.      Importing contact information into eMerge is a breeze, with several different methods available. If you have a large address book full of people in your e-mail program, you can import it into eMerge, but you'll have to enter the values for most variables by hand. The easier way to handle your contacts is to keep a database, either in a contact manager program or in a regular database program. Export the database as tab-delimited text (making sure you keep the database fields in the same order as the variables in eMerge), and you can import thousands of names and other information flawlessly and within seconds, without having to enter anything by hand. This is a powerful feature since it allows companies that already have databases of their customers to keep their old database and integrate it into eMerge with little difficulty. Simple, quick, and easy      Aside from being easy to use, eMerge is fast and reliable. It is capable of maintaining 24 separate connections to the Internet, allowing you to send 3000 e-mails in one hour with a 28.8 kbps connection. It is so fast in fact that it caused OpenTransport to become overloaded and crash, but this problem has been fixed and now, in addition to the faster OpenTransport module that was written to fix the problem, eMerge keeps track of the status of each e-mail, so you know who received your email and who didn't. Because eMerge is able to connect directly to the recipient's mail server, bypassing your own and any others along the way, it is guaranteed to deliver every e-mail. You can optionally use your own mail server, or allow eMerge to attempt to connect to the other server before resorting to your own.      eMerge is an excellent mass e-mail utility with uses ranging from billing for a company to reminders for doctors and dentists, even to send out a newsletter with a personal touch. Although the limit of 10 variables is a bit disappointing, as many people could find uses for far more, eMerge is nonetheless an excellent choice for all your mass-mailing needs (other than spam), and is customizable for any use. © 1998 The MacNN Review