| Recently one of our readers posed a
question in the Forum about using the Mail merge to
create Email mail outs from Microsoft word and Microsoft
Access. If you are using Office 2000 (Outlook, Word and
Access) or less then everything is as normal!
But, because of the proliferation of Virus and
exploit scripts that capture details from Outlook's
contact's (Or address book) and because many people on
the Net are abusing the power of email for 'Spam' - mass
advertising, Microsoft has made some changes to the way
mail merge with email works in XP.
Microsoft knows and understands that a well laid out
news letter or promotional to your existing clients or
reader list is critical in business. It can communicate
new product lines, changes in technology or just help in
keeping your customer, your customer!
The Problem(S)
When you choose Email Merge, even if you are
accessing a Microsoft Access database, when you
associate an object to give you an email field you
receive the new XP warning that something or some one is
trying to access your Contacts address book.
Now if you go past that stage you will need to
manually 'OK' every single email, a progress bar and
warning makes this take about 30 seconds for each email.
So you find your self tied to the computer for days, or
you KILL the process and fire up your old Office 2000
machine.
The Solution
If you have migrated the news list from Office 2000
or 97 then you most likely had the mail merge work on
TEXT or RTF - as you wanted the mail out to be as Mail
Client friendly as possible! (But lets face it, today
95% of people use email clients that handle HTML mail.)
This is now your downfall. Microsoft has recognised
that most Spammers and all Virus / exploits send out
text emails, so if you select HTML for the format of the
body of your Email Merge everything works 'Sweet'.
If you are setting up a new mail merge the default is
to use the HTML format for the body of the email. There
is very little documentation about this at Microsoft,
but is worth reviewing the link they have on their site
on how to set up a news letter mail merge.
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