Mail merge for email list in HTML format -- not receiving

[Eric Bailey]

Hello all,

I have arrived here in desperation.

I will try to keep this to as simple of a summary as possible, though I have
been trying to tackle this for a while now -- I will greatly appreciate any
input, as I am, by now, growing frustrated and feeling as though I have
exhausted all troubleshooting possibilities.

In Word, I am trying to mail merge an email to many recipients. I can get
through all the steps of the Mail Merge Wizard just fine, until I come to
select Electronic Mail and arrive at the final box, Merge to E-mail. From
this, I have an appropriate To: selection from my data source, my subject
line is fine, but here's where my problem lies: When I select HTML for my
Mail format, and send to all records, it acts as though it's sending to all
the records (I can watch it cycle through the names in the merge fields,
along with the tallying total in the status bar), but nobody receive the
e-mail.

In other words, it acts and looks like a perfectly successful merge, but not
one single person receives it, even though all the e-mail addresses are valid.

If I change the mail format to Plain text, it is sent successfully, but then
it gives me the lousy Microsoft Office Outlook dialog box that, as a security
measure, now forces a five-second delay between each e-mail sent. This is
very prohibitive, considering the size of the mailing.

I have tried reducing the mail size, I have tried test messages to myself, I
have changed my e-mail account, my other e-mails send fine, I have used the
Check for Errors button only to discover nothing, I have tried to find an
easy solution to the Plain text 5-second delay problem (I can't find an easy
one, especially without being an administrator).

I am considering resorting to writing a general letter, rather than
including the personalized fields, and copying the thousands of e-mail
addresses into a bcc: field!

I know this may seem like a vague and unsolvable problem (after all, I have
no error message to report -- it looks and acts fine, but simply is not
sending), but again, I would appreciate any and all input.

Why is it not sending the e-mails when I select the HTML format?

 

[Eric Bailey]

Oh, and I apologize for not doing so originally, I guess it might help if I
denoted the version -- both Outlook and Word are Office 2003, SP3.

 

[Featheriver]

I'm having the same problem trying to mail merge with Word 2007 and Outlook
2007 as Eric.

I periodically publish a newsletter. I prepare the newsletter in Word 2007.
I then, using Word, mail merge email addresses from an Excel 2007
spreadsheet. The merged e-mails are then transmitted to Outlook 2007 into the
outbox.

When I then click the “send†button to email the newsletters from the outbox
none of the e-mails are sent. They remain in the outbox.

I then am given the following error message from Outlook:

“Task '(e-mail address removed) - Sending' reported error (0x800CCC61): 'Your
outgoing (SMTP) e-mail server has reported an internal error. If you continue
to receive this message, contact your server administrator or Internet
service provider (ISP). The server responded: 571 5.7.1 Message contains spam
or virus: 21544:4044192688|F142'â€

I had been sending the newsletters without problems for some time until this
week when I encountered this error message. I have endeavored to resolve the
problem myself without success.

I checked the e-mails for virus and none was found. I don’t understand why
the “spam†classification applies since (1) the newsletter isn’t spam and (2)
I’ve never encountered this error message before.

I can successfully e-mail a single newsletter if it is the only one in the
Outbox. But not if there is more than the one.

Doe anyone have any idea why I’m encountering this problem? I'm almost
convinced the problem is centered in my ISP's mail server as rejecting the
e-mails I'm trying to send. However, I can't establish whether or not any of
them have ever reached the ISP server in the first place.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Bulk mail could be identified as spam. Also, if the message contains a
number of links, these may also mark it as spam.

 

[Featheriver]

Thanks for the tips Suzanne. You're probably right about the "bulk mail" and
the hyperlinks. Do you happen to know of some other email program I can use
to get around this problem?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I don't think it's a question of your mail client so much as your ISP.

 

[Featheriver]

You were right Suzanne. It was the hyperlinks from the Newsletter that
blocked the sending of the e-mails. After I read your note earlier I removed
all the hyperlinks from the Newsletter and everyone of them them went through
the ISP (Hughes.net) without a problem.

Neither Word 2007 nor Outlook 2007 were the culprits.

The links from the newsletter ran to the full articles summarized in the
newsletter to the complete article in a blog I write.

Sure doesn't help the readers of the newsletter because they lose the ease
of clicking the link and reading whatever was of interest to them on the blog.

The newsletter loses its value to the reader and to me. I may just have to
give it up.

Thank you for the tip--it ended a week long search for an answer to my
dilemma.

 

[Terry Farrell]

Not a perfect solution but you could enter the links as plain text rather
than a hyperlink with a note to say copy and paste the link into your
browser's address box.

 

[Featheriver]

That is about the only thing I can think up Terry. Thank you for the idea.

 

[Mike]

I've got the same problem described at the beginning of this thread, but only
when using a computer running Windows Vista. Windows XP presents no problem,
even with hyperlinks in the email. So, I've concluded that the
hyperlinks/ISP are no the issue in my case. And I perform the same steps on
Vista as I do on XP.

Succintly, here's what happening:

1. On a PC running Windows XP, Outlook 2007 and Word 2007 I have no
problems. I initiate a mail merge document in Outlook 2007 that I intend to
send as an email (from the "contacts" view, I go: Tools>>Mail Merge) and
follow the wizard successfully to the end.

(I initiate in Outlook this way because I can filter recipients using
"Categories").

2. When the wizard is done, I can preview all recipients without any issues.

3. I can then successfully send the email as an HTML email even when the
email contains hyperlinks.

When I repeat the same exact steps on a Windows Vista machine, also using
Outlook 2007 and Word 2007, I can preview all recipients, and when I hit
"Merge & Finish", it appears as if the mail merge is working. But, the
recipients never receive the email.

So, I wonder if Vista is the culprit? Any ideas?

Thanks,

Mike

 

[John Gustafson]

I am having the exact same problem that Eric reports, only I am using Windows
XP and Office XP, both with all available updates. As recently as August 19
of this year, I WAS able to mail merge an HTML e-mail to a large list. Now
the merge appears to run, but no messages are sent unless the e-mails are
formatted in plain text, which does me no good in this case.