I need to do a mail merge for about 100 clients. I need it to include each client’s address in the To: line - and only that client.
Is there any way to add to the contact list, or a distribution list, in bulk by copying and pasting the whole set of email addresses? It seems that all of the available methods require that I do it one. damn. email address. at. a. time.
Is there ANY way around this?:mad:
Isn’t that what BCC is for? Each recipient will only see themselves listed and nobody else.
BCC won’t do what the OP is asking for. When I try to put an address in “BCC” and nothing in the “To” field, the recipient gets an e-mail that shows “Undiscosed recipients” in the “To:” field.
I don’t know of a way to do what the OP is asking for using Outlook only.
Just explain to your boss or whoever is requesting this that you could put all 100 client e-mails in the bcc line as “Reply” suggested. This is common practice for corporate e-mail communications. Most clients understand that you are communicating with multiple clients and that certain e-mails are “Form” communications to all clients. Explain that this will take about 30 minutes to execute.
OR, you can do as he reqested and it will probably take about 2-3 hours.
How interesting. Learn something new every day 
Can this be done with a Word mail merge?
OK, I actually found a way to do this.
It’s actually really simple, although not at all obvious (at least to me) that you can do that. Take your list, and get it semicolon delimited (which should usually be easy enough to do):
Then, create a new distribution list. Click Select Members. Not Add New (I have a pit thread boiling with the way Microsoft sometimes names stuff like this). Copy and paste your comma delimited list into the members field at the bottom.
Hit OK, and then you’re done.
Begging to differ. Many email spam filters do not let a message through if somebody’s BCCed.
Please tell every major Wall Street bank that I deal with then. Sending mass communications out with all of the client addresses in the Bcc section is how they do it.
FWIW, glad you found a work around.
After I looked at your link, I wonder does that really solve your problem?
I assume that you will be putting the distribution list in the To: field.
If so, I think that list of all recipients will be available to each recipient, not just the one client.
Turns out, it actually does not solve this problem. But there still is an (almost as easy) solution. I’d wanted to tackle the distribution list first, then the problem of learning to do a mail merge. Turns out, though, that the way a mail merge works in Office 07 makes the DL unnecessary.
When creating a mail merge in Word (it has to be Word, Outlook doesn’t do that), there is an option to pull email addresses from an Excel spreadsheet. So yay. If I have the email addresses in a database, I can easily do what I gotta do.
And to think there’s a $24 add-in that does the same thing…
Anyhow, thanks for all of your thoughts.
Interesting. FWIW, I did a test of sending a bcc message from another email account. It worked, even though security’s pretty tight here (as I’m sure it is for companies that work with banks). That email address is in my work e-mail’s contact list, though…
ETA: Reply -> I just noticed that you’d mentioned a mail merge. Thanks, that’s right. What I didn’t know was that I could skip the original question in this case, but what I’ve learned is still good to know.