Do Not Email

[redchip]

Hello,

I am attempting to set a field in ACT that would define a contact as being one not to email. (We use swiftpage as well as a stand alone email system). Some of our contacts have requested not to recieve email from us, but we still need to keep their contact information. My idea was to add a yes/no field (do not email) for the contact. when it is clicked you do not send email. However, what i have found, when creating the yes/no field and trying to dynamically create a group using it, the only operator for a yes/no field is 'equal to'. Unfortunately, for the contacts that previously existed, the value for the new field is null, so there is no way to create a group of everyone except those with a checked do not email field. What I need is an operator that is 'notequalto'.

Am I missing something? Or do others have a better way of identifying contacts that specifically do not want emails?

btw, we tried moving the email address to the email2 field and leaving the email address field blank, this caused problems checking for duplicates as we test the email address field fist.

I would appreciate any input on this question.

Thanks

[jnpurdy]

There should be two options:

•  Equal to & True in the next box or
•  Equal to & False in the next box

I use this for almost of my dynamic lookups. 

[redchip]

Hi John,

What I have noticed is the isequal to  -  True, gives me all the contacts that have the box checked.

the isequalto - false, seems to only give me contacts that have either been added after the field was added, or ones that had the box checked and then unchecked, however it does not give 'old' contacts that existed on the system before the field was added. Its like the value of the field is null for those contacts?

[pbuchtmann]

If this is the case if you right click on the field and select equal to False does this give you the result. If this is correct I would run check and repair from the tools, maintenance menu and then check the query again as I have used this many times on multiple databases

[redchip]

Thanks Paul,

I have run the check/repair database, if I set the operator equal to ture I get the 80 contacts that have the check box  checked.

However if I set it to false, I get 624 contacts selected out of a total of 49701 contacts in the database.

I have checked and was incorrect in my last post, they are not all new of have had the check box selected and unselected. some have been untouched for 6 months to a year. I have looked for some kind of pattern and havnt found anything that would point to why they are not being included in the selection.

As a test I added a yes/no field to the demo database, and did the group selection the same and it worked exactly as expected.

It seems there may be something on one of the contacts that that is preventing the querry from continueing?

[redchip]

I havnt been able to figure out why the group selection did not pick up all the contacts. However I was able to replace the field globally to true and then back to false... then manually change the 80 or so contacts back to true. Now the group selection works as expected.

It must have been a problem when the field was created??