Emailing event participants - using 'send email' versus 'civimail'

Question

We have a question about using our CiviMail configuration for emailing Event participants. We recently had an event with > 60 participants. When we went to send a follow-up email, we went to the event, selected all the registered participants, and then selected "Email - send now" under Actions. We used one of the standard CiviMail templates, but it apparently used our mail.php backup that we have configured instead of sending it through our Sparkpost extension. Because of that, we weren't allowed to send to more than 50 participants, so the mailing had to be broken into two parts. Additionally, in the resultant emails, not all CiviMail tokens were resolved.

Obviously, we could have put the people in a temporary group and then used the CiviMail interface that we've been using for months to send large bulk emails through Sparkpost.

Is there a way to configure the event "Email - send now" to work like Civimail? Do we always need to create a temp group when we have many participants? Additionally, I presume we are not getting bounce reports as we normally do via the Sparkpost webhook.

Answer 1

I think I see what is happing.

When you select your Participants (from Find participants) you only have an option for

• Email send now (50 or less)

When you select your Participants as Contacts (from Adv Search) you should have an option for

• Email schedule/send via CiviMail
• Email send now (50 or less)

So, I think you can get what you want by searching for Contacts who were at your Event, and using that option, rather than searching via Find Participants.

NB iirc you need to have an existing CiviMail group that you use as part of this process, but it doesn't result in your participants being added to it. That said, I am not certain if all the bounce etc happens for these 'tack on' contacts but expect it would.

NB what the Action is called changes between versions so yours may be different if not 4.7.x.

READ MORE: instructions are at https://docs.civicrm.org/user/en/stable/email/mass-mailings-using-civimail/

starting with "If you are basing your mailing on search results, perform your search (for example, using Search > Advanced Search) and then choose Email - Schedule/Send via CiviMail from the Actions drop down. "