Moving contact groups

[Brian]

I have a new ISP (Verizon DSL) that won't allow me to send
email messages addressed to more than 99 recipients at a
time. But I run an e-newsletter and have over a thousand
subscribers. My subscribers' email addresses are
currently organized in nine contact groups ranging from 25
addresses per group to over 300 addresses per group.

I do not have time to move email addresses one at a time
into uniform folders of fewer than 99 names each. Is
there a faster way to regroup all those screen names?

I have already tried combining two small contact groups by
dragging one group folder into another one. Although it
worked in theory, I am not happy with the results because
the moved group appears as a subgroup inside the other
folder, rather than as individual addresses. That will
make the periodic task of clearing non-functioning email
addresses out of the folders intolerable.

Moreover, that "solution" won't help with the flip side of
the task, which is splitting the large contact groups into
smaller ones.

What is the fastest, most efficient way to distribute a
thousand email addresses evenly across 11 or so contact
groups? Thanks.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

I'd switch to using a mail merge to email and sending individual messages.
That's far likely to get past people's spam filters. You can put the
contacts all in one folder and merge that folder.

 

[Brian]

That's a good idea. Unfortunately, Verizon has limits on
that, too. I'm told that their limit is 99 addresses per
email message AND 499 messages per day. If that's the
case, then I'm probably better off moving all of my
addresses into contact groups of under 99 each, which
would only count as 11 or 12 messages when I send them.
If I do a mail merge as you're suggesting, I'll have to
send out the same e-newsletter to a third of my
subscribers one day, a third the next, and the remainder a
day later. (Thanks, Verizon!)

Anyway, unless there's yet another option, I'm still
looking for the fastest way to move contact groups into
other contact groups as I explained in the original
inquiry.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Actually it sounds like you'd be better off moving to a different email
provider. Have you ever thought of installing your own SMTP server or does
Verizon block that? Another solution would be to host your mailing list
elsewhere. There are lots of different mailing list hosts that can also help
with the handling of nonfunctional addresses.

There are no shortcuts for moving members between Outlook distribution
lists.
--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of
Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers