Wow...your post made me check out the favorites and saved searches options. I've used saved searches in the past, but not much lately.
This kind of post would be more welcome in the the "product features" forum.
Rooster is right that you can do it several ways, but you're smart to pick the brains of experience here and try to get some advice on best practices. I know Maximizer can be intimidating and it can take years to figure out what’s actually going on. The manual explains menu options, but not why or what's the best way to achieve a goal. It's almost like college: the registrar can tell you that ECON214 is a required course, but won't tell you that Prof. Payne mumbles and grades harshly so you should wait and take Prof. Studley in the spring.
The Favorites lists appear to have a couple of advantages over UDF's:
1. It's easy to take people out of it en masse, and virtually impossible to uncheck a UDF (please see my post in the other forum and add your voice to my campaign).
2. It’s kind of disposable (but this may be a disadvantage, see below)
But UDF's are better for the following reasons:
1. A UDF can be a component of a larger search. If you’re just sending 100 it’s not that big deal, but it’s useful sometimes to search for “all those who were sent the mail, haven’t replied, and are in the meatpacking industry” or “all the nonresponders who haven’t made a purchase in 4 months” or “all the nonresponders with names M-Z” (assuming your colleague will take the rest) and whose titles are not VP or CEO (if your position is not supposed talk to executives).
A real-life example is something like “all the nonresponders whose emails do NOT begin with a..z or 0..9.” When I started at my old job, my boss had marked lots of people “on the maling list” but he hadn’t actually had gotten their email address.
2. By adding / deleting people from one or several favorites lists, you lose the ability to easily see who you originally sent the email to.
3. Even if you were to keep the original favorites list (overcoming issue #2), you now have critical information outside of the address book (yet also outside of another of what I would call “major module,” like expenses, calendar, Campaign Manager, etc). I like to keep everything related to contacting someone in the Address Book. Granted this seems at odds with the original Maximizer design philosophy (I use neither the “phone log,” nor the “journal”, but I can’t see how *anyone* would use both).
4. In addition to having the general “who did we send email X to” stuff outside the address book, you also have part of your contact history with that particular person off in some other window. This is both inconvenient and also unlikely that your colleagues will look for it there (unless that’s the typical practice in your office). When I pull up a person’s record, I want to know what my company has sent them recently, and I don’t want to have to put them on hold for 10 minutes while I retrieve a dozen “favorites” lists (and wonder how to get back to the list of people I was previously viewing). Granted, logging the email to the notes mitigates this issue.
As far as saving searches, I would NOT use them for something specific like a mailing list. As you can tell, I think all the contact’s information belongs in the contact, IMO. I use saved searches only for convenience for things I’m likely to do again (see #1).
And as a wild card, you might consider the "campaign manager" feature. I've never used it, but it might work for you. I think I'll stick to UDF's due to habit and the value of having everything in one interface, as well as the fact that campaign manager looks like a somewhat lengthy process more appropriate for big mass-market kind of stuff, not just contacting a few people.
Anyway, it’s kind of a long way of saying “use a UDF,” but, as Rooster said, you have a lot of choices and I think we learn more from reasoning and debate than a simple recommendation (well, at least in the other forum...this one is supposed to be more nuts & bolts).
