The mailing section of GiftWorks is certainly a popular feature that gets used by many GiftWorks users to produce printed letters, labels, and envelopes.  Recently a number of users have been complaining that their mailing process is "freezing-up" or moving extremely slow.  While there are many possible causes for this undesireable behavior, I think there are two main causes for these issues.

A lot of recipients

When you produce a mailing, all the recipients that are included in the mailing need to be processed to determine the proper addressing, collect the necessary information for the mailing, and to perform the correct sorting, etc.  If you have a large number of recipients, then the data collection process may take some time (> 1000 recipients).  The speed of your computer and the location of your GiftWorks database (network folder or on the user's machine) will affect the speed at which mailings are produced.  You may need to demonstrate and greater amount of patience if their list of recipients is large.  In a future release, we will work on improving your experience by showing the progress of the mailing process in greater detail.

(A lot of recipients)

The Big Picture

When you create a letter in the Manage Letter Library, you can insert pictures into the letter by clicking on the Insert Picture icon:

You may be tempted to pick any picture that you can find on your computer and simply insert it into your letter.  It is easy to insert a picture, but you need to be aware of the size of the image.  One of the biggest misconceptions that exists is that if you resize the picture in the letter by grabbing the picture handles and making it visibly smaller that it makes the picture a smaller size.  The reality is that it makes it visibly smaller but it doesn't make the picture smaller in terms of how much storage is needed to hold the picture.  If you insert a 1 megabyte picture into a letter and resize the picture to be 1 inch by 1 inch big in the letter, the picture itself still requires 1 megabyte to store.

When GiftWorks attempts to produce all the letters for a mailing, it will be drastically affected (negatively) if you have inserted large images in your letter.

If you insert pictures into a letter, you should try to keep the images at about 100k or less in size.  When you insert your image, you can view the size of the picture by viewing the details in the file-open window (you may need to change your view to the "Details" view in the view menu):

If you have an image that is greater than 100k in size and you want to use it in your letter, you can reduce the size of your images using a program like Adobe Photoshop or even Microsoft Paint (which comes with most versions of Windows).  There are a few other tricks to shrink pictures to be able to use them in your letters.  Microsoft even has an image resizer in their Power Toys pack that they'll give you for free.  Download it here