Mass personalized emails from Outlook?

December 13, 2004 9:08 AM

Mass personalized emails from Outlook [more inside]

For work, I need to send about 400 emails to mentors serving in my program.
I would like to personalize each email with the mentor's name and the name of his/her mentee. The email addresses, mentor names, and mentee names are all stored in an access database.
If I were doing this with paper, Word could easily handle a mail merge. Does Outlook (2002, SP3) do something similar?

posted by Coffeemate to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

You should be able to do it in Word using the Access database, and then "mail merge" it into emails sent out through Outlook. The Mail Merge Wizard in Word can walk you through it. (I used to do it all the time for work; it's reasonably easy.)
posted by occhiblu at 9:13 AM on December 13, 2004

occhiblu, that's beautiful. I was looking for a more complicated solution, and Google was merely turning up bulk email get-rich-quick schemes.
Thank you!
posted by Coffeemate at 9:17 AM on December 13, 2004

Yeah, word is good at this. Just make sure it is set to send plain text emails, instead of HTML or .DOC attachments. I'm not aware of a way to do it in Outlook.

(Alternately, this seems like it would be a pretty easy script to write if you knew any php/cfm/etc...)
posted by idontlikewords at 9:18 AM on December 13, 2004

Be wary of anti-spam software blocking your outgoing message. I've had it happen to me sending out e-mails to about 20 friends and family.
posted by RobbyB at 9:18 AM on December 13, 2004