Gammadyne Mailer integrates directly with virtually all databases, including Access, Act!, Centura SQLBase, dBASE, Excel, FoxPro, Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server.

Database integration has many uses, including:

• Outgoing emails can be personalized with database data.
• Data from incoming emails can be added to the database.  This is very useful for automating mailing list sign-ups, processing form data, etc.
• Recipients can be removed from the mailing list.  This can be triggered by incoming email (opt-outs or bounce-backs) or manually from Gammadyne Mailer's user interface.
• Recipient data can be modified/updated by incoming email or manually from Gammadyne Mailer's user interface.  When performed automatically, the user will typically set up Gammadyne Mailer to search a database column for an email address, then modify another column on the row (if a match is found).
• Filtering:  clauses can exclude certain recipients based on database values.  For advanced users, you can specify your own SQL WHERE clause, or even the entire SELECT statement.

A database is not required.  Gammadyne Mailer can send to a list of email address in a plain ASCII text file.  It can even merge in data from a comma-separated text file, like this for example:

id,name,email,age
1,John Public,jpublic@foo.com,26
2,Jane Doe,jane@bar.com,30
3,Jim Smith,jsmith@foobar.com,28

Gammadyne Mailer connects to an external database via ODBC (Open Database Connectivity).  This is a Microsoft standard that is designed to allow any application to access any database.

ODBC is already installed on most machines.  It is often installed along with the database, and by Microsoft Office.  ODBC can also be freely downloaded from Microsoft.

To allow third party programs to integrate with the database, the database must be a registered ODBC Data Source.  Data Sources are maintained in the ODBC Data Source Administrator, which can be found in Control Panel under "ODBC Data Sources".  In Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista, look in Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Data Sources.

Once a database has been properly registered, it will appear in Gammadyne Mailer's drop-down list of databases on the "Database" branch.  For help on registering or setting up a database, please refer to Gammadyne Mailer's help file.