Mass Emails In Outlook 2003

[damunzy]

I currently have 180+ email addresses and I need to send emails out to for a Verterans Club at a college (I work in the VA [Veterans' Affairs] office at OCC in New Jersey).

Currently I am using Distribution Lists (DLs) inside of Outlook 2003 but there is a limit of about 80 emails per DL- meaning that I have have 2 full DLs and one DL with a few addresses in it. I get a list of emails generated by our system but updating the DLs can be manually intensive. My current system is:
1) Generate the report. This gets emailed to me with each email address on its own line. (not a problem)
2) Save the email list as a text file stripping out blank lines and extraneous information. (not a problem) Date the file.
3) When I need to update the DL I will take a diff between the two files (I use unxutils/diff.exe to do this). (problem for non-techies)
4) From the diff I find out what email addresses were added and which where deleted (last time I ran after 7 days there were 7 adds and 1 delete). (problem for non-techies)
5) Manuallly update the 3 DLs having to guesstimate which DL the delete(s) will come from and placing the adds in the last DL. (time consuming)

I am thinking of going lower tech and just saving the email addresses from the report as a text file. When it comes time to send an email just opening that up to copy and paste the email addresses into the To: line.

Anyone got an opinion on what the "best" method would be?

Thanks in advance!

 

[warpus]

I build mass-email systems at work (no, they do not send out spam - we target our students, mostly)

I use a web server for this.. makes it very easy to send out thousands of emails with the click of a button AND to customize this thing to do whatever you want it to.

Not sure if you have access to a web server and a database, but if you do, that's how i'd do it.

 

[Till]

So you get all addresses with each report? Then it's easy. Just write a script to grab all the addresses and to write them into a mail template. Then open the template with Outlook and compose the body of the mail.
You also might want to consider switching from Outlook to something more suitable for mass emailing, such as postfix.

 

[damunzy]

I am just a peon working in the VA section of the financial aid office. I have no ability to change the software we are using, unfortunately. And, changing to Postfix, I believe, would be a change on the server side (Exchange) which is definitely be above my minimum wage pay grade.

Thanks to both warpus and Till.

Looking up the email template suggestion- a little scripting might be possible.