Bulk Email with different data to each recipient

[Ava Healy]

I regularly use regular letter and email mail-merge in Outlook and MS Word. Our 3rd party tax system produces a standard plain text file of reminder letters to each of our clients, but each letter within this file has one section with their personal tax numbers, therefore I only want each client to receive their respective letter. Supposedly, you can do a bulk email of this data thru the Mail Merge Wizard, with each client receiving only their respective letter. The file start off with the following header: "Email", "Letter". The next line is: "client email (e-mail address removed)"," . (Period added for my punctuation). At the end of the first letter, before the next partially personalized email letter is the following: " . (Period added for my punctuation). Then the next line is: "client email (e-mail address removed)"," . (Period added for my punctuation)

I can produce and email the file thru the Mail Merge Wizard, but in my test email, each email address receives the entire file of letters with everyone's personal tax numbers. In the preview screen in mail merge wizard, you can see this too. The "sample letter" contains the entire file of letters. The tax service claims this does not happen when they try it, and I have walked thru each step over the phone with them exactly, but still get the entire file emailed to each recipient. It seems there should be some type of code to stop the email of the subsequent recipient with the next recipient's letter and data

What am I doing wrong? I use MS Word and Outlook 2002. Thank you.




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[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

I am not quite sure what you are doing, but if you execute the the merge to
email, you will be asked to nominate the field in the datasource that
contains the email addresses and a single letter with the data from that
record will be sent to (only) the email address in the record for each
record in the data source.

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Please post any further questions or followup to the newsgroups for the
benefit of others who may be interested. Unsolicited questions forwarded
directly to me will only be answered on a paid consulting basis.

Hope this helps
Doug Robbins - Word MVP

I regularly use regular letter and email mail-merge in Outlook and MS

Word. Our 3rd party tax system produces a standard plain text file of
reminder letters to each of our clients, but each letter within this file
has one section with their personal tax numbers, therefore I only want each
client to receive their respective letter. Supposedly, you can do a bulk
email of this data thru the Mail Merge Wizard, with each client receiving
only their respective letter. The file start off with the following header:
"Email", "Letter". The next line is: "client email (e-mail address removed)"," .
(Period added for my punctuation). At the end of the first letter, before
the next partially personalized email letter is the following: " . (Period
added for my punctuation). Then the next line is: "client email
(e-mail address removed)"," . (Period added for my punctuation).

I can produce and email the file thru the Mail Merge Wizard, but in my

test email, each email address receives the entire file of letters with
everyone's personal tax numbers. In the preview screen in mail merge
wizard, you can see this too. The "sample letter" contains the entire file
of letters. The tax service claims this does not happen when they try it,
and I have walked thru each step over the phone with them exactly, but still
get the entire file emailed to each recipient. It seems there should be
some type of code to stop the email of the subsequent recipient with the
next recipient's letter and data.