Legit Mass E-Mail

[Rookcr]

Ok,

My company needs to send out e-mails to roughly 2000 recipients. What is the best way to do this in Exchange 2003. The reqirements are listed below. I thought about a mail enabled public folder but the group resonsible would not be able to manage who had acted on any replies.

Exchange 2K3 Standard.
Outlook 2003 Clients

-Mass Mail 2000 addresses

-Any replies from the mailer need to come back to a group of 6 internal users.

-Reciepents cannot see each others addresses.

Would it be better to send out to people and have them physically reply to a different e-mail address with questions?

Looking for suggestions.

Thanks.

 

[AdmanOK]

I would create two distributions lists... for example mylist-subscribers and mylist-managers. I would subscribe all of the recipients to the mylist-subscribers and the 6 people from your company to the mylist-managers. I would then create an account called mylist@mydomain.com and set it to automatically deliver mail to mylist-managers. You also need to give the six people "send on behalf of" permission to mylist@mydomain.com. This way when they send out a message they can use the from field in Outlook and set it to mylist so that all replies end up coming back to all of them. Hopefully that makes sense. Sounds confusing, but it's pretty simple once it's set up. They only bad part is that you will have to create active directory contacts for each recipient in order to add them to the distribution list.

 

[Rookcr]

Adam,

Thanks for the prompt response. That was my thinking. I wonder if it would be possible to do a mail merge from Excel or an access DB to send the e-mail or if there is a way to import that from AD.

 

[Rookcr]

Here is what I did. I hate to say it but Word03 makes this very easy. I had a Excel list of all of the e-mail addresses. I converted that into a basic access Db then used Mail Merge from Word 2003 and it was as easy as cake. Thanks for the help.

Rook

 

[jonarden]

Those responsibe for those 2000 e-mail recipients at your company may soon start asking someone (you?) to update and delete names from the mailing list and/or create other mailing lists. If they do, this can soon take a LOT of time.

Our company has frequent on-line training sessions for our web-based software and we must e-mail schedules to different groups of participants; so list management is critical. I just finished testing a number of multi-list e-mailing pograms. Many were seriously flawed, but I found that Group Mail,

http://www.infacta.com/

worked well. It was easy to show a project staffer how to create and manage multiple mailing lists and set-up customized insert fields within different e-mails. The software can be installed on a robust workstation and set-up to send from an account on the Exchange server. The reply to address can easily be configured for different Distribution Groups. Of course, lots of mailing software out there claims to do this, but Group Mail actually did it at a reasonable cost. This is just something for you to consider, you may find it helpful in the future.

For the record, I don't work for or have any financial interest or connection with Group Mail. Consider this as a "proof of concept" that worked for me; other mailing software may be just as good, or even better.