Best Practice - Infomail send out

[dufvenmark]

Hi, we run a real estate agency mostly selling new production in a resort area.

Our clients fill in our web form telling us they want for exemple a house near the ocean and have budget X amount of Dollars.

We then send them a general hi email, asking for a little more info, and that we will send them a few info email about a few potentially suitable best sellers in sepearate infomails.

I would then like to be able to select a few suitable developments, depending on budget and prefs, by ticking boxes and press send. With the the contacts name inputted like in a word mail merge. Like "Hi, FirstName, below is some more info on Sea View Apartments bla bla"

I prefer them to look like emails, with attachments and all. Not word documents with many pages and page margins.

What is the best way?

Should I create email html templates and use the built in mail client to shoot these mails? I will use Outlook for regular mail. (The built in client is awfull.) . A bit of a hassle since they need to be sent one by one from the contact view, (no "tick boxes"(?)) compose mail, options, select template again and again.

OR

Should I use the mail merge fuction (that I can not get sendining, no error message if I send from word with plug in, just do not receive anything. If send other way around, starting in Sugar, I get "expected type text/xml not html/xml" or similar error message after trying to open that token word doc. Using 5.1a.). If I fix this problem - will the mails still not look like word files with sevaral pages instead of emails? Or even worse - an email with a word doc attached?

OR Should I stick to our old pre SugarCRM practise of using Outlook .oft templates for each development? Bad since then everyone end up using different versions on their laptops. Or everyone will need vpn server access to templates folder or similar.

Do not like PDFs since we want all the be inline in the mail. Not see attached PDF that no one will bother opening.

Grateful for help! Any of above soultions require a bit of work. Need to choose right from the start.

[dufvenmark]

Would perhaps be nice if these screen:

http://YourSugarServer.com/sugarcrm/...s&action=index

Had a send button that let you choose recipients.