newsletter question

[Martin]

I have the following problem.
We use Microsoft windows SBS with Exchange 2003 and outlook 2003 on the
clients.

Every week we send a newsletter to all our employees (private email
addresses) and some clients and other interested people. These are about 350
mails in totall.

Right now we just send by putting all addresses in BCC, but this is not an
ideal solution beacause some recepiants see this as spam.

Using Distibution Groups is also not realy a solution beacause we can not
put all members in 1 DG, and thus we have to use several DG's. This is not
perfect either.

Using groups or Query Based Groups in Active Directoy is also not a option,
beacause we just do not want all these addresses in the AD.

I found a application that is a plugin for exchange that can send emails to
outlook categories. this would also be a solution, but beacause we use
several contact folders to seperate the different contacts
(employees/clients/relations/etc) we would have to send the newsletter
several times, once for every contact folder.

Is there some other way of managing this kind of newsletter lists in
outlook/exchange???

The most ideal solution in my mind would be some sort of plugin that gives a
extra field with every outlook contact in every contact folder like
:"newsletter yes/no".
And then a possibility to send a mail to all contacts that have this option
set to "yes".

I guess this is not possible standard, so i'm looking for the next best
solution for this. maybe later i will dive in to some visual basic or
something to write my own plugin to do this.

Hope you can help me find the best, workable solution for sending this
newsletter.

thanks,

Martin

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

All the mail programs I've seen depend on the addresses being in one place. YOu might want to combine them into a single folder, then use Categories to distinguish them.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Martin]

ok... i can do that... put them all in 1 folder... use categories...

but then again i have the same problemm...

i want to mail to 350 persons... thats to much to put in 1 Distribution List
(wich is stupid i think, why did MS do this???? Why limit this to so few
contacts???)
And i just don' want to make several DL's and put those in 1 DL as work
around. That is just waiting for something to go wrong or forgetting to
update 1 list after a email change of a contact....

Why isn't there a simple good solution for a simple mail list like this in
outlook/exchange?? These day's a weekly newsletter is pretty standard with a
lot of companys i know. So i just can not believe why MS didn't build in such
a option somewhere...

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

This is the good simple solution I use: One folder. No DLs. Multiple categories. Mail merge (Tools | Mail Merge).

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers