Mailmerge to e-mail

[Nightflyer]

Word mailmerge using Excel as data source works exactly as intended when
merging to a New Document or to Printer, but when I select the button to
'Merge to E-mail' through Outlook, merge occurs in Word based on activity by
Spelling and Grammar Status icon on Status Bar. But the merged e-mail
document does not link to Outlook - no activity indicated by Outlook icon in
system tray and no record of e-mail sent in Outlook Sent Items box. When the
'Merge to E-mail' dialog displays, To: field points to e-mail address data
field in Excel data source. All components are Office 2003 on Win2000
system. Outlook is the default mail client. Is there something explicit
that needs to be done to link Word and Outlook for this function?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Hi Nightflyer,

I don't know what the answer is but this problem does pop up from time to
time.

Which format e-mail merge are you using (HTML, plain text, attachment)? Does
it make any difference if you change the format?
Do you have any addins loaded in Outlook?


Peter Jamieson

 

[Nightflyer]

Thanks for responding Peter. No, I haven't tried any other format except
HTML. I will give Text a try and reply to this thread if anything positive
occurs.

I have no add-ins with Outlook, in fact I usually use Outlook Express and
loaded Outlook just to accomplish this broadcast e-mail exercise - which
turned out to be a bust!

Nightflyer

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Hi Nightflyer,

loaded Outlook just to accomplish this broadcast e-mail exercise - which
turned out to be a bust!

If you can get away with plain text, you should be able to merge to Outlook
Express anyway. If you have to use HTML, you have to use the full Outlook.

Since you seem to have a pretty fresh installation of Outlook, I would
a. be sure that the versions of Outlook and Word are the same
b. send at least one ordinary e-mail through it before doing the merge
(Merge may encounter "first use" dialog boxes otherwise, and give up)
c. consider importing the email addresses you are going to use into
Outlook's address book (or contacts list). It's just a hunch, but it could
be that some of these failures to send via Outlook are related to problems
with Outlook not being able to resolve addresses because they are not in its
address book.

Peter Jamieson

 

[Nightflyer]

Peter,

Your suggestion to try Plain Text was an interesting exercise. Although I
never saw it when trying to send HTML, using Plain Text immediately brought
up a dialog stating that "Another program was trying to access e-mail
addresses in Outlook". Obviously a security protection, but the intent of
this experiment was to use a database that contained, among other items, the
intended recipient's e-mail address. The 'Merge to E-mail' dialog has a list
box that offers all of the database's fields as the 'To:' item. Since I
selected the 'Email' field, I assumed this is what it would use as each
record's To: address. What I haven't said before in this thread is that
doing things exactly as I have described previously has actually worked...
but only sometimes. However, using Plain Text as the mail format does work.
Although it is far more cumbersome than I had hoped for because each record
requires acknowledgement of the dialog about accessing e-mail addresses in
Outlook. I don't understand why it's looking at Outlook for the e-mail
addresses when I specifically identified the DB field to use. All those
acknowledgements make this an unworkable solution to send out 2000 database
confirmation e-mails. And I don't want to put 2000 e-mail addresses into
Outlook for a one-time mailing to these people. Maybe if my security level
was at the lowest setting the confirmations wouldn't be necessary?? Or maybe
I have to resort to spammer software to do this legitimate mass mailing.

Nightflyer

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

You are misinterpreting the warning message. It does not mean that the
email addresses have to be in Outlook, rather that another program is trying
to make use of Outlook to send messages. You can avoid having to click OK
for each message that is trying to be sent by getting hold of the Express
Click Yes utility that is mentioned in the Preparations section of the
article "Mail Merge to E-mail with Attachments" at:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/MailMerge/MergeWithAttachments.htm

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I suggested you tried plain text as an experiment, really. Or two
experiments.
1. Word does things a bit differently as you have seen - it might have been
enough to succeed with the merge.
2. Outlook pops up messages about what it is doing.

But did the merge actually end up putting items in the Outbox as a result?

There are actually two different dialog boxes when you merge to Outlook -
the very first one (which you may not see in all circumstances) says

"A Program is trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in Outlook.
Do you want to allow this?" If you see this one, it /is/ about Outllook
wanting to resolve addresses, and you need to provide access for as long as
you can, or need to to execute the merge. You should then see the second
type of message, which as Doug says, is about the fact that a program is
trying to send e-mail on your behalf and does not mention addresses. If you
give the program 10 minutes' access to the address book, you will be
re-prompted for that access if the time runs out.

What that first dialog box tells us is that Outlook is trying to do
something with the addresses that requires access to something. However,
that does not necessarily mean that it will reject messages if it cannot
find their addresses. (That does not happen here, for example, but I'm
connected to an Exchange server and things may be different). But there may
be another factor, e.g. which address book services you have and in what
sequence Outlook uses them, or the whole thing may be irrelevant. I thought
it was worth a look.

Peter Jamieson