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Issues sending many emails from Office

Sending many emails from Office is possible but there are traps.

Lee W asks:

I have a need to send 50,000 emails with an attachment. The email addresses are currently stored in a Microsoft Access database. Does Outlook have any limitations?

You should not need any special code – what you’re describing is a ‘mail merge’ with output to emails instead of printed letters or envelopes.

Word has been able to do that for years from almost any data source and certainly from an Access database. If Word can’t read the data source, then use some other utility to convert the data into an acceptable format. Outlook is used to send the messages.

50,000 is a lot of messages and Word/Outlook might stall if trying to process so many at once. With a big mailing it’s a good idea to break it up into chunks (eg record 1 to 4999 then 5000 to 9999 etc). The mail merge system is, understandably, designed to work as fast as possible – an option to ‘pause’ for a few seconds between each record would be helpful to prevent Office jamming on large merge runs but has never been implemented by Microsoft.

The main problem might not be with Word or Outlook but your ISP. Many ISP’s have limits on the number of outgoing messages permitted each day or week from each customer. This is intended to stop spammers using the ISP’s to send out bulk mail. You should check with your ISP to see what limits they impose – often these limits are unrealistically low and people get blocked after sending only a few hundred messages (when running a small club, charity or PTA etc). Even if there are no stated limits, sending out thousands of virtually identical messages has a high risk of being deemed spam almost no matter what you do, the content of the message or the circumstances. You should advise the sending ISP of your intentions before doing the mailing.

Sperry Software has a Send Individually utility  that will send individual messages to each person in a list. It does have an option to ‘throttle’ the flow of messages to a rate that suits you.

Adding an attachment to the messages raises an additional issue. With any email plus attachment mailing there is always the problem of delivery. Many people either won’t or can’t open email attachments (regardless of the source or format) due to concerns about virus infection. You might consider putting the attachment on a web site and putting a link in the email to a web page that has a link to the attachment. This would avoid many sending and delivery issues as well as giving you the ability to update the web site file if circumstances change after the mailing has commenced.

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