Word 2007 merge to email limitations?

[GlenH]

We have a database of around 20,000 employees. Once a month we need to send
each employee an email with the status of an incentive program they're
eligible for. We just upgraded to Office 2007 Enterprise. Last month, using
Office 2003, the merge to email took maybe two hours. This month, the merge
fails after 700 or 800 records with a "not enough memory" error from Word.
Looking at task manager, I see that winword.exe is taking up nearly 1.6 gig
of the 2.0 gig of ram. Is this just a limitation of Word 2007, or is there
some kind of memory leak going on here? Whatever the case, we can't keep
breaking up the merge (which is an Excel spreadsheet) into 700 record
batches. Service Pack 1 is not installed. Would installing that maybe help?

Or is a 20,000 row merge to email just too much for Word/Outlook, and should
we look for a mass email solution?

Glen

 

[Cathy.Allington]

Hi Glen:
I too am very interested in this response. Every mass mail programme
we have looked at involves uploading a file to a web based service,
and none have been easy to simplay replace an existing fdat source, so
you end up with many databases. Hope you get some answers
Cheers
Cathy

 

[Ryan]

I've myself noticed this issue of longer than usual mail merges. Upon further
inspection, I've noticed that email sent through a mail merge in Word
2007/Outlook 2007 take up almost a megabyte per message, which is ridiculous.
Any suggestions on how to rectify this issue is appreciated.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Are you merging to HTML format?

If so, the issue of Word hanging etc. has come up more than once and has
been reported. What will happen as a result I do not know. Your description
is slightly different (crash rather than hang), so may not be the same
problem - since you are an Enterprise user it may well have more effect if
you can report this directly to the appropriate Microsoft support channel in
your country/region. (Here, we're just volunteers)

 

[Aaron, CISSP]

I've experienced this problem at my organization as well. When running the
mail merge to email process, the workstation first consumes all physical
memory then consumes all of the page file before stopping.

Increasing the page file size actually produced worse results. We're going
to add more physical memory to the machine.

We've opened a case with Microsoft. Their initial suggestion was to verify
that the user had permissions to write to
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files or
the parallel location on XP. Our users are not admins on their workstations,
so I'm going to test this hypothesis.

 

[Glen Harness]

I'm not high enough in the food chain at my organization to place the call
to MS support...

I'm wondering if instsalling Office 2007 Service Pack 1 would make a
difference? We've reverted to doing the email merge on a laptop with Office
2003 for now, but next week we have to do another 20000 mailing to folks
with a personalized flu shot consent form. We may have to look at some mass
email software...

Thanks.

Glen

 

[Peter Jamieson]

There have been other suggestions about this issue of late, including...
a. the one in this conversation:

<<
We've opened a case with Microsoft. Their initial suggestion was to verify
that the user had permissions to write to
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files
or
the parallel location on XP. Our users are not admins on their
workstations,
so I'm going to test this hypothesis.
b. one in the docmanagement newsgroup:

<<
As a work around I installed MAPILABS Mail Merge tool kit. ***I did not use
Mail Merge Tool kit, I just installed it! The merge ran as it should 486
email in 4 min. NO HANG!!!!!!

Would love to know what changes the tool kit makes to office 2K7????
Since I haven't been able to replicate the problem here, I have no way of
checking either of these suggestions.

 

[Glen Harness]

Thanks. I'm pretty sure the user is an admin on his workstation, but I'll
double check. That mail merge tool kit might be worth trying anyway, so I'll
check that out as well.

Glen

 

[Aaron Munoz]

I spoke with a PSS engineer regarding my case last week and he indicated
Microsoft is working on a hotfix to correct this issue. He estimated a
release date sometime in October.

He indicated that this issue has been reported several times, so I imagine
there's a fairly large demand for a solution.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Good to hear - thanks very much for the update.

 

[Rich Glenn]

Any word on the Hotfix release?

I spoke with a PSS engineer regarding my case last week and he indicated
Microsoft is working on a hotfix to correct this issue. He estimated a
release date sometime in October.

He indicated that this issue has been reported several times, so I imagine
there's a fairly large demand for a solution.

 

[Robert]

Was this issue ever resolved? I am having the same issue constantly, and
killing Outlook and Word each time is a pain in the A**. Has M$ gotten a hot
fix out? (e-mail address removed) if anyone has a clue.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

There is a hotfix dated October 28, 2008 at

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957692

(The problem is described as:

<<
Word 2007 may stop responding when you use Mail Merge to send
personalized e-mail messages to an e-mail address list that contains a
large amount of recipients, such as 10,000 recipients.)

I haven't tried the hotfix myself, but was unable to recreate the
problem in the first place.

Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk