OL2000: How to Broadcast Mail Using Outlook

This article describes how to send broadcast mail. Broadcast mail is the same e-mail message body text sent to many different addresses, each as a separate message. In this way only one address appears in the To field and a single message is sent to each recipient.

Outlook does not include a method for sending broadcast mail; however, when used with the Microsoft Word mail merge feature, Outlook can broadcast mail to a group of contacts. Each recipient receives an individual message, addressed only to them.

Conducting a mail merge to e-mail addresses requires you to accomplish the following:

1. Publish your Outlook Contacts as an e-mail address book, so that the e-mail addresses become available as data for a Word mail merge.
2. Draft a Word document to serve as the body of your broadcast mail message.
3. Conduct a mail merge to merge the contact data with your Word document. The key difference with this mail merge is that you set the "Document Type" to "Form Letters" and the Merge options to Merge to "E-mail".

For additional information about how to mail merge Outlook Contacts using your version of Outlook and Word, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: