Best solution would be to use the mail merge feature in Outlook XP. Then there is no BCC, and each recipient gets a nice personalized version of your email (eg. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Farber). You should be able to access your SQL DB's directly from the mail merge function without any real effort.
Tom. -----Original Message----- From: Bauer, Mr. Rick [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2001 2:27 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: Exchange 2000 "Blast" E-Mail: Best practices/product suggestions? Note sure if this is a Outlook or Exchange questions, but I am looking for a best practice solution, and <pathetic sucking up sound>this is the smartest group of people I know in the Exchange world</pathetic sucking up sound>. 1. Organization environment: Exchange 2000, Outlook XP clients, 900 users (students & faculty, boarding school) 2. We want to be able to send a blast e-mail with emergency contact information/news to non-Exchange e-mail users (parents, alumni). Present number of foreign e-mail addresses is ~2600, but the number will go past 5K soon. 3. We track e-mail addresses in several SQL and other databases, so ganging them all together is fairly awkward; once they are in an excel/word document (separated by a semicolon, of course), then they are dumped into a BCC field, and then the message is sent. 4) In light of Sept 11 issues, we ran into a problem in that the BCC field will time out after about 500 individual e-mail addresses are dumped in the field. Solutions: **3rd part list manager software?/Costs?/Experiences (we REALLY don't want to start yet another DB for this if we don't have to; we'd rather create some kind of address dump and go from there). We really don't need a name/address connection for these addresses, we want to extract them from our databases, dump them into some BCC-type entity, and then send. **Private distro from an individual mailbox in Outlook? Sounds like a lot of work to do the management. I am not a spammer, nor is this a fund-raising thing; the school has a lot of alums on Wall Street, and we were overwhelmed with traffic on Sept 11th from people wanting to let us know they were alive, or folks looking for missing comrades. We also wanted to be able to send one e-mail to all our parents quickly (we are 5 miles form a nuclear power plant, so there was some concern about a terrorist attack). Again, I am not sure where to post this, if but those of you with experience in solving this issue could contact me (even offline), I would sure appreciate it. I searched the archives and the MS exchange site, but could not find anything that spoke to a best practice or recommendations. Free beer for good suggestions, and sorry for the length of the post. Regards, Rick Rick Bauer, Chief Information Officer The Hill School * 717 East High Street Pottstown, PA 19464 (610) 326-1000, ext. 7373 * fax: 610 705-1767 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] website: http://www.thehill.org e-learning web: http://academy.thehill.org _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
