Comments on: Mass personalized emails from Outlook?

Question: Mass personalized emails from Outlook?

Coffeemate — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 09:08:38 -0800

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?

By: occhiblu

occhiblu — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 09:13:37 -0800

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.)

By: Coffeemate

Coffeemate — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 09:17:25 -0800

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!

By: idontlikewords

idontlikewords — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 09:18:15 -0800

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...)

By: RobbyB

RobbyB — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 09:18:29 -0800

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.