From generic mailbox in mailmerge (2000)

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I have a client with a group of about a dozen people working within one department, all using Outlook 2000. I have set up a generic mailbox for this department so that their customers can send emails which all workers in the department can access.

They need to send out a bulk mailing to all of their customers and are able to do this quite comfortably using the mail merge feature with Word. However when they send these mailmerged emails, the “From” field always displays their own personal email address. They all have “Send on behalf of” permissions set for this generic mailbox, and I have been told that having someone log in under the name of the generic user is not an option.

Is there anyone out there that can shed some light on how I might be able to go about allowing them to change the email address displayed in the “From” field when they do these mailmerges.

Thanks for any assistance that might be forthcoming.

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Could you set up the users so that they have to choose which Outlook profile they want to log on as? If they have full permission to the mailbox, then they should be able to just open the mailbox using another Outlook profile. When they send the mail merge, the emails would come from the generic mailbox.

Hope this helps,
Becky

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I used that technique this Spring. Here’s my story.

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Becky and jscher.

Thanks for the advice. I had tried to get them to log on to Outlook as the generic mailbox earlier, but they were quite adamant that that was just too much hassle for them. To appease them, I was hoping that there might be some other solution out there that someone was aware of. Not to worry… I will go back to them and tell them that it looks like their best option is as stated above.

Just for your info, I am going to trial something called MassMail 1.0 by Vertigo Software which I am led to believe will accomplish what I am after. I will let you know how I go.

Thanks again,

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Becky, jscher and anyone else that might be able to help me.

Okay, a few new twists have occurred with my problem now. We have now created a Public Folder for the client so that all mail directed to an email address is posted to this folder. From there, all the staff are able to go to the public folder to collect any mail sent to the department. No problem.

They wanted to be able to send replies to these emails, so we have given them “send as” permissions so that their replies come from the “Public Folder” email address. All working fine.

However, they want to be able to send out a bulk mailing to all of their clients, also using this Public Folder email address, so that any replies are automatically sent directly to the Public Folder. Not so good.

From what I have been able to figure out, you cannot log into Outlook using one of these Public Folder accounts, and you cannot setup a profile with the desired sender details (as required by Exchange), because it doesn’t recognise the account as a user. So I am now back to square one on how to have a mailmerged mass mailout all appear to come from this Public Folder address.

I found two utilities which came very close to helping me out.

1. This ">MassMail sample goes very close to what we are after, but does have a drawback. It will only read the addresses from a text file which contains only email addresses. It would be much more convenient if it would look directly into the contacts list which they keep updated. This is constantly changing as they gain new clients and drop old ones off their list. Exporting the details from the contacts to a text file is not that hard, but as it is a constantly changing list, it is something that they would have to do every time they wanted to do a mailout. Although they are quite good in pointing out exactly what they want to do, none of the staff are “computer smart” enough to complete this without their hands being held.

Do any of you know of anything that is out there that can do the following:
a. Mailmerge to a large list of clients, so that they receive personalised emails,
b. Have the From address as a Public Folder email address,
c. Be capable of placing attachments within the outgoing email,
d. Read required address from a Contact folder.
e. Work on a Windows NT4.0 system using Office 2000.

Sorry that this is so long and wordy, but I wanted to try and state my problem as clearly as possible, as well as showing what I had already tried. I am sure that there is someone out there that has been able to achieve what I need to do, or that can modify some of the things I have tried to make them work the way the people in this department want them to.

Any of you that have bothered to read all of this, your help will be extremely appreciated as I am now completely at a loss as to where to go from here.

Thanks in advance for any replies which may be forthcoming.

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Okay, it seems like I am on my own for this one .
I thought it was quite a big ask, but better to ask the question than sit and wonder.

Looks like they are going to have to make do with one of the partial solutions we have come up with so far.

Thanks to Becky, jscher for their previous replies.

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