Mail Merge using Lotus Notes...

[Sujesh]

Hello,
I am trying to send an email to a group of persons using Mail Merge.
However, when I reach the last step where the mail needs to be sent, nothing
happens.

I am using Word 2003 on a Win XP SP1 machine with Lotus Notes as the default
mail client.

Does Mail Merge work only with Outlook? Can something be done so that I can
send mails via Lotus Notes?

Pls do let me know.

Thx

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Does Mail Merge work only with Outlook?

It depends. As far as I know,
1. merge to email using HTML format only works with the full Outlook.You
have to use the plain text or attachment option with anything else
2. to get anything to work at all with Notes you have to ensure that it is
the default email client in Windows, and enable its MAPI stuff (somewhere in
the Notes client options)
3. even then, I /think/ there is a problem with the Notes Client because it
needs user intervention to send each e-mail that Word produces, but it's a
long time since I had a Notes setup here so I can't test.


You may find that a 3rd party utility will help. A lot of people seem to
find the MAPILabs Mail Merge Toolkit useful, and I think that works with
Word+Notes, but I haven't used it myself - see

http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/mail_merge/

 

[Sujesh]

Thx Peter for the suggestion. However, it did not work. Using the mailmerge
toolkit also did not help much.

Any other suggestions pls?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Hi Sujesh,

Not really, sorry.

In the past I have seen third party packages that can do this, but they
either seem to have dropped that functionailty or are very expensive. In any
case, you can search the web as easily as I can.

However, I have always understood that the whole idea of Notes was to make
it easy to share/distribute rich text material, and I would have thought
that the other approach to mailmerging "to" notes is to
a. create a rich text document /in/ notes
b. either find a way to import your data into a notes database and use it
to do a mass mailing completely within Notes, or find a way to access
external data (i.e. without importing it) and do the same thing.

I have seen various articles on the web that seem to discuss this kind of
approach (mostly some LotusScript is involved) but without my own copy of
Notes I have no way to see what is really involved, what is actually
feasible in terms of external data access, and so on.