Sending e-mails to one or more constituents

CiviCRM provides tools for sending e-mails directly from the system, both to small sets of contacts (a single constituent or small group of constituents) as well as to large volumes of contacts. Later in this chapter, we will look at broadcasting e-mails using CiviMail in more detail. The line dividing easier, simpler, lower volume e-mailing and bulk, mass, or broadcast e-mailing is not always clear. Broadcast e-mailing is clearly appropriate when you are sending messages to thousands of recipients regularly as you need to know the open and click-through rates and segment based on that behavior, and you do not want to manually process invalid e-mails from the list or deal with temporarily unavailable accounts.

To keep things relatively clear, we'll call sending a non-broadcast e-mail e-mailing and follow CiviMail's terminology of referring to a broadcast e-mail as a mailing, and will always refer specifically to CiviMail rather than CiviCRM when...