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Ever needed to send an email out to a lot of contacts in your organization or customer base in a hurry? Here's a tip that may help if your mail client is Outlook 2003 (not a bad guess for most enterprises). Say you've got a few thousand contacts that you've assigned to different categories from your Master Category List. These contacts could be in your local Outlook address book or they could be in a public folder on your organization's Exchange server.



I needed to do this recently, so I opened my Contacts folder and thought if I clicked the Categories field header, I should be able to sort by contacts by Category and then multi-select the desired contacts and send my message to them. Well, I thought Outlook was simple but it's not that simple! Remember, I'm basically a server guy, not an information worker, so simple things like sending emails can trip me up, but give me a network monitor trace to analyze, and I'm your huckleberry.



Anyway, when I clicked the Categories field header and instead of sorting contacts by category, a dialog box that said "You cannot sort by this field" appeared. What do you do when this kind of thing happens? Ask a Microsoft MVP for help! I checked some news groups frequented by MVPs and quickly found the answer:



1. First, right-click the Categories field header and select Group By This Field.



2. Next, hold down SHIFT and multi-select all the contacts in the Category you want to send to.



3. Now from the Tools menu select Mail Merge and in the Mail Merge Contacts dialog opens.



4. At the bottom of this dialog there is a listbox control labeled Merge To. Click this and select E-mail as your merge to destination.



5. Type a subject line for your message and click OK. Word 2003 will now open and you can type the body text for your message.

6. When you've finished typing your message, click the Merge To Email button on the Mail Merge toolbar in Word. This opens the Merge To Email dialog where you can select the message format (HTML, plain text or attachment) and click OK to send your email.

Of course, you could also use distribution lists (DLs) to send mass emails to contacts, but the problem there is that it can be a pain to maintain these DLs because although you can multi-select contacts to add them to a DL, you can't do so by Category.

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