Email options to send templated messages and PDF documents. Follow

Printer's Plan offers an SMTP option that will allow you to email directly from the program. This will allow to you take advantage of a simplified workflow for emailing. Also, you can take advantage of the HTML email templates that can be used to spruce up your communications. This also allows for many PDF documents to be attached to an email automatically.

If you are not using SMTP you will not be able to take advantage of some of these options, like HTML email templates.

SMTP Setup

Before emails can be sent from Printer's Plan, the SMTP settings will need to be updated with your existing email provider's SMTP information. This also supports IMAP information if that is needed.

These SMTP settings can be updated from the 'Settings' tab in the 'General Settings' section. Select SMTP Settings to update the information.

For more information on your email provider's SMTP Server information check with your email provider.

Sending Emails Using Printer's Plan. 

Once the SMTP information has been entered into the Settings, check the 'Enable SMTP' box to begin sending emails using this configuration. 

There are 3 main ways to send emails from Printer's Plan:

1. "Email" button in the main menu at the Top: This button offers the ability to select between the two options explained below and the difference depends on your use case. Sometimes you will send a Form Letter template with no attachments and other times you may need to send a template email and include a PDF document.
   
   
   
2. "Print & Email" button: Open a job and click the "Print & Email" button which will allow us to create a PDF attachment for the email. Once the printing window opens, there is an option for 'Email PDF' which will default to using the email template associated with the type of attachment being sent. For example, when sending an "Invoice" the "Invoice.html" file will be used automatically. If the program does not find a matching file the email will not use any templates.
3. "Email Form Letter" button:  Open a job and click the 'Email Form Letter' button at the top of Printer's Plan to send a form letter. Once selected a prompt to choose a template will appear. This gives you more freedom to select what template you want to use based on why you are emailing the customer on this job, but not automatically create any attachments. The templates offered are contextual, so you will see the available Jow templates when in a job and the available AR templates when inside AR. It does this by filtering out files that do not start with the correct words.
        

Updating Email Templates

It's important to update the default templates before sending emails from Printer's Plan. These templates are found in the Printer's Plan directory. 

Use the File Browser in either the web-based client or the RemoteApp resource to open the cloud-hosted machine's file directory. For local users, you can navigate to your server's shared directory.

The email templates are typically stored here: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\PlanWeb\App_Data\Email

In this directory there are 2 types of templates:

• Plain Text: These templates will contain a body of text with a text-based footer. No images or hyperlinks can be added.
• HTML: HTML templates can be updated using the included HTML WISWYG editor to include network hosted images and hyperlinks to web pages. 

Printer's Plan will use the HTML version of a template if there is one created. For example, if sending an invoice via email and there is both a plain text version and an HTML version, Printer's Plan will use the HTML template by default. 

You can learn more about editing the HTML files by reading the article for Using, Creating, And Editing HTML Templates.