Sending e-mail to lots of contacts

[wwgolfer]

I'm trying to send an e-mail to more than 1,000 people on a contacts list I developed. (NOTE:This is not spam. Each of the people on the list signed up to be there and expects this message.) The problem is, I don't want alll 1,000+ names to show up at the top of each of these e-mails in the TO: list. Sending a BCC doesn't seem to work either as in that case all of the people in the BCC portion get a message addressed to some one else they've never heard of. It seems like there ought to be a way to e-mail all of these people and have only their name appear, but I haven't been able to find it. Can Outlook do this? If so, how?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.

 

[Davetoo]

Send it to yourself, and BCC everyone else.

 

[sanjeevddn]

KeepTo blank .Mail will go with blank To.

 

[strella]

Hi

Sending to a list is pretty easy to code in Outlook as all the heavy lifting is done in MAPI. Not too bad in a script language, either.

There's an open source at

http://www.roninsoftwaregroup.com/r2app.htm

look down for Send2lst about 80 lines of code.

There are others available. Google to

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/E-mail/

for starters.

The thing is that Outlook is not designed for batch processes, 'Automation'. If you are sending often to the same list it is a lot easier to manage the process as an edit or two of text files followed by a job submission.

You should get, depending on your system speed, roughly twenty to a few hundred submissions a second, so a thousand to adddresses becomes a no-brainer taking a minute or less.

 

[beckas]

You can do this via a mail merge. Here's general instructions. I believe these instructions work with OL98 or OL2000, Office 97 or 2000.

How to send a Mail Merge document to your Outlook contacts

Step 1: First you should create a template in a word document. Once you have made the word document you can save it and close it for later use. Here is an example:

Hello

This is a test of Mail Merge.

Thomas

Step 2: Now you will open Microsoft outlook and highlight the contact list you want to use for the mail merge.

Step 3: Go to the Tools Menu and select Mail Merge.

Step 4: Under Document file, click Existing document, and then click Browse to select the document.

Step 5: In Merge Options, select “email” under the Merge to box.

Step 6: Under the Message subject line box type the subject you wish to use for the message.

Step 7: Click Ok to open and edit the word document.

Step 8: At this point you can add any merge fields to the word template that you wish. You can click on insert merge field and select a field from the list. For example if you wanted to insert the first name of the contact it would look like this:

Hello «First_Name»,

This is a test of Mail Merge.

Thomas

Step 9: (Warning: Completing this step will result in messages being sent to your Outlook contacts) When you have completed adding the Merge fields to the document you can select the Tools Menu and choose Mail Merge. Under choice three you will click on Merge and then click Merge again to start the mail merge. Now all the contacts on your contact list should receive an email containg the document. You can even verify that the items were sent by looking in your sent items.