How do I get individual "BCC" email addresses to appear as "To:" to the recipient?
At my office, I often send emails to entire teams of folks, or our entire organization, possibly hundreds of emails. Personally, I think it unprofessional for my recipients to see only my email as the "From" and "To" address when I use the "BCC" field. I also think it unprofessional to put all those email addresses in the "To" or "CC" fields. I would like to put all the emails in the "BCC" field and have each recipient see their own email address in the "To" field. Mail Merge doesn't work well because my company works off Exchange so gathering email addresses from there, though possible, just isn't very effective. I need to be able to just pick addresses off the Outlook Exchange Corporate Address Book and paste them into the BCC, or something like that that will accomplish the same thing. Any ideas?
ASKER
That sounds good, but:
1) It's not easy to "manually export your GAL into a Contacts folder." The only options I see after selecting several contacts in the GAL is to "Save to Contacts." I don't see any option to save to a separate Contacts folder, i.e. "For-Mail-Merge." I could possibly use this as a fall-back position if I could just figure out how to do as you suggest and export to "A" Contacts folder and not "THE" Contacts folder.
2) There are other managers that would like to do the same thing so it's got to be "manager-easy" - scripting out contacts might be way beyond easy enough to share with others.
3) The options on the slipstick website seem to have the same issue as #2.
1) It's not easy to "manually export your GAL into a Contacts folder." The only options I see after selecting several contacts in the GAL is to "Save to Contacts." I don't see any option to save to a separate Contacts folder, i.e. "For-Mail-Merge." I could possibly use this as a fall-back position if I could just figure out how to do as you suggest and export to "A" Contacts folder and not "THE" Contacts folder.
2) There are other managers that would like to do the same thing so it's got to be "manager-easy" - scripting out contacts might be way beyond easy enough to share with others.
3) The options on the slipstick website seem to have the same issue as #2.
SOLUTION
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
IvaSoft,
I had never seen that product by MapiLabs. The video makes it appear to do exactly what is being requested, but the documentation states "outlook contacts" and not GAL. Have you used it with GAL entries?
Justin
I had never seen that product by MapiLabs. The video makes it appear to do exactly what is being requested, but the documentation states "outlook contacts" and not GAL. Have you used it with GAL entries?
Justin
ASKER
IvaSoft: I might give that "Send Personally" a try at home; however, here at work, we have the "Installer Police" that don't allow anything to be installed other than corporate approved applications. You have to have an Installer User Name and Password to get Administrative rights to do installs. Thanks, though. If it works at home, I'll at least share some points with you for the tip. Thanks.
Justin,
no, I haven't.
Victor
no, I haven't.
Victor
ASKER
So, do either of you know how to easily do a GAL "Save to Contacts" that will put the saved GAL contacts into an alternate Contacts folder? If that were easy, I'd go ahead and use Mail Merge if that's my only solution.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
You move your personal contact to a subfolder first so that you don't corrupt your own list. The "Add to Contacts" doesn't let you choose where to add it.
ASKER
OK ... So to really outline this in more detail, in case someone else comes along and wants to do something similar, I've put the steps I went through below (In MS Outlook 2003, SP3). Once you understand the steps, you obviously can do things differently as far as the folders go:
I. Create New Contacts Folder "Personal-Contacts" {Name it whatever you like, really}
II. Create New Contacts Folder "Management Group" {Or whatever for your Mail Merge}
III. Move all contacts from Contacts Folder to the new "Personal-Contacts" folder.
IV. Open Global Address List (GAL)
VI. Leave Personal Contacts where they are or move them back to the main Contacts folder.
What a person does with the folders is open to a zillion options. You could always just leave your contacts in the Personal folder and use the main Contacts folder for various Mail Merges if you do that a lot - or whatever the individual's preference. The goal is to get your Mail Merge contacts, and only those, into a separate folder that is then selected using Mail Merge.
Thanks for all the help!
I. Create New Contacts Folder "Personal-Contacts" {Name it whatever you like, really}
II. Create New Contacts Folder "Management Group" {Or whatever for your Mail Merge}
III. Move all contacts from Contacts Folder to the new "Personal-Contacts" folder.
IV. Open Global Address List (GAL)
A. Pick ContactsV. Move all Contacts from Contacts (your newly added ones) to the folder you made for Mail Merge
1. Manually either one by one, or using shift-click to select multiple.B. Close the GAL
a. Click the "Add to Contacts" button on your Toolbar.2. Or, Find an existing Distribution List in the GAL
a. Rt-Click the Distribution List, select "Properties"
b. Select all members in "Members" window (Click, Shift-Click)
c. Click "Add to Contacts"
d. Click "Yes" when asked, "Do you want to add the selected users?"
e. Cancel out of "Properties"
VI. Leave Personal Contacts where they are or move them back to the main Contacts folder.
What a person does with the folders is open to a zillion options. You could always just leave your contacts in the Personal folder and use the main Contacts folder for various Mail Merges if you do that a lot - or whatever the individual's preference. The goal is to get your Mail Merge contacts, and only those, into a separate folder that is then selected using Mail Merge.
Thanks for all the help!
1) Manually export your GAL into a Contacts folder in Outlook. You can then select your recipients from that sub-folder.
2) Script an AD dump of your Exchange aware users (using a scripting language such as PowerShell) into a CSV or Excel file and use that file as your data set.
Here is another way to make your GAL portable:
http://www.slipstick.com/exs/portagal.asp
Bottom line is that Outlook doesn't have a way of hooking into the GAL for a mail-merge. You have to get that data into a different format first.