Question

[petronia]

You have an Excel sheet containing hundreds of email addresses. Now you need to send an email to each of those addresses, i.e. use it as a mailing list. You'll definitely have to do it again in the future.

What's the best course of action? >_>

EDIT -- There does seem to be a way to do it with Mail Merge (which I've never used). Failing that, there's a shareware plugin.

Comments

eep. haven't done it in ages, but you might try this:

[marej.livejournal.com]

If you're using Microsoft Outlook, you can import a contact list directly from Excel right into Outlook.

If I remember correctly, you have to have the worksheet in Excel closed, when you're doing the importing. Then again, I always end up finding out the proper order of actions by good ol' fiddling.

In any case, if you'd use the import function in Outlook, the wizard pops up and it should walk you right through the steps.

Re: eep. haven't done it in ages, but you might try this:

[petronia.livejournal.com]

And then after that how do you send an email to everyone on the contact list without all the addresses in the entire contact list appearing in every To: header, and without sticking it all in BCC? >_>

I mean, there has to be a way to do all this...

Re: eep. haven't done it in ages, but you might try this:

[marej.livejournal.com]

Er, well, yes, it can be done, because our admin does it all the time. I don't know how to do it, though.

I think you have to do some fancy work on your custom list with Mail Merge, but I can't be sure. For the minimal stuff I need, BCC does the job.

If you can wait, and won't get your answer from somebody else by Tuesday, I'll ask our admin when I get to the office.

Sorry, man, I wish I could be more helpful.

Re: eep. haven't done it in ages, but you might try this:

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Well, I'll do my best to figure it out. XD Thanks for the tips.

two cents?

[fantabulous.livejournal.com]

Well ... first question: is this for work or for personal use?

Re: two cents?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It's for work. Not spam, though. ^^;

Re: two cents?

[fantabulous.livejournal.com]

:-/ Meh ... then you can't really use whatever e-mail client you want then, can you?

I'd suggest using Mozilla Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/); it allows you to make mailing lists pretty easily. :-P Although it would still be pretty tedious.

[smurfmatic.livejournal.com]

You want to launch yourself in spam programming? :D

I'd do it with existing APIs (they must have those in each programming language), but then I'd have to find those too. XD So, err, could start looking with LWP (libwww-perl). Not the same job I had to do (I had to send repetitive HTTP requests through a given web form) and so I eventually took someone's LWP-based script to do it.

I'd definitely do it the scripting fashion, much cleaner than GUIs will ever be.

(I was serious about the spamming, you tried Googling that?)

-C

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but you have somewhere you can run a script. I don't have somewhere to run a script, I can't even set up a server mailing list, and it was all typed in already by someone who's not me.

[smurfmatic.livejournal.com]

I think I'm going to get myself a Mac. Linux boxes don't work as we always want them to in a non-work situation, and I don't want anything more to do with MS. Hmm. Would you be able to afford a Powerbook?

-C

[moderntime.livejournal.com]

I think this is too late for you, but Microsoft Office definitely has a mail wizard that automates the whole process for you and does everything that you need. I think that's what Mail Merge is though.