If you have Microsoft Office System 2003, you can use Microsoft Word's relatively new email merge feature together with Microsoft Outlook (not Outlook Express) to merge and send personalized emails

Create A Data File From Your Outlook Contacts

Again, your data file is a file containing the name, email address, and other pertinent information of each recipient of your email. You already have such a file, or something close to it: your Outlook Contacts folder, which likely contains most or all of your recipients' names and email addresses, and to which you can quickly add any other information your email merge requires.

Open Outlook and your Contacts folder (the one actually named Contacts). Scan it to see if all of your intended recipients are listed. If any are missing, you may be able to find their all-important email addresses among the messages in your Inbox. Switch to your Inbox, click the From column heading to sort by name, and see if you can find a message from any of the missing recipients. When you find one, double-click the message to open it. Right-click the sender's address and choose Add To Outlook Contacts; Outlook will add the address to your Contacts folder.

If you can't find an email address in your Inbox, search through the messages in the Sent Items folder. If you still can't find an address, you'll have to manually enter it: Return to the Contacts folder and click the New button (or press CTRL-N). Enter the person's name and email address in the form that appears. If you have to make another entry, click Save and New; otherwise, click Save and Close.

Now all your recipients are in the Contacts folder—along with many nonrecipients. You can make the recipients' names easier to work with by breaking them out into a folder of their own. In Outlook 2002, choose View and then Folder List (if it's unchecked), and in the Folder List, right-click Outlook Today - [Personal Folders]. In Outlook 2003, choose View and Navigation Pane (if it's unchecked) and right-click Personal Folders. From the shortcut menu, choose New Folder. In the Name box, enter a name for your new folder (something relevant to the merge job, such as Holiday Email Recipients). From the Folder Contains list, select Contact Items and click OK.

Return to the Contact folder. Hold down the CTRL key and click each of the names you want to include in your mailing. When they're all selected, with the right mouse button drag the whole group to your new folder (in Outlook 2002, your new folder will be in the Folder List, under Outlook Today - [Personal Folders]; in Outlook 2003, it will appear in the My Contacts window); from the shortcut menu, choose Copy Here.

Meld The Data File For Your Purposes

Double-click your new folder to open it and double-click the first entry to open its record form. Your final data file preparation task is to make sure each record form contains all of the personalized information you want to merge into your emails. For example, if you plan only to personalize the greeting—as in Dear John—each record needs to contain only the recipient's first name and email address. If you plan a more formal greeting, for example, Mr. Smith, you'll need to add the appropriate courtesy title before every name.

If you plan to include a personalized message for every recipient, you have a little more work. In the record form, click the All Fields tab and choose Miscellaneous Fields from the Select From list. Enter your personal message in User Field 1. Be sure to type carefully—you don't have the benefit of Word's spell checker here, and you won't be able to make corrections during the merge process.

When you're sure the first record is complete, click the Next Item button and click Yes to save the record you edited and display the next record. Repeat the process until all of the records are complete.

Create Your Message

Open Word and type your message, leaving spaces for the merged data.

How you format your message depends on whether you plan to send it in plain text or HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) format. If you're sending the email as plain text, you don't have to format the message at all, as none of the formatting will survive delivery. About the only thing you can add to a plain text email is a hyperlink and then only if you spell the link out in its entirety. Links you assign to other text, such as Click Here, won't appear or work on the receiving end.

HTML format lets you add more impact, letting you add anything from font attributes (such as bold or italics), bullet points, and horizontal rules to colors, pictures, and even sounds. But the results on the receiving end aren't always so reliable: Word generates its own flavor of HTML that looks fine in Outlook and Outlook Express but can look like a disaster in AOL or other email programs.

If you decide to go with HTML, one way to minimize bad results is to create the entire message in a table. Click the Insert Table button and specify a 1 x 1 table. Then, on the Tables And Borders toolbar, click the Border button and choose No Border to remove borders from the table. Enter your first paragraph in this first cell; then press TAB to add a second cell for your second paragraph (or press TAB twice to skip a space between paragraphs). This method eliminates extra spaces on the receiving end. And by specifying a table width (via the Table and Table Properties command), you can keep lines from wrapping or unwrapping depending on the width of the recipient's email window. Insert each picture into its own table cell and make sure to only use pictures in Web-friendly formats (GIF [Graphics Interchange Format] or JPEG [Joint Photographic Experts Group])

On With The Merge

Once you finish your message, save it. With the message still open, from the Word menu, choose Tools, Letters And Mailings, and Mail Merge (in Word 2002, Mail Merge Wizard). The Mail Merge task pane appears on the right of the Word display. Under Select Document Type, choose E-mail Messages; then, at the bottom of the pane, click Next: Starting Document. (Your Word display will switch to Web Layout view; you can leave it or switch it back to your previous view if you like.) Under Select Starting Document, choose Use The Current Document and click Next: Select Recipients.

Under Select Recipients, choose Select from Outlook Contacts. Below that, click Choose Contacts Folder. A list of your Outlook Contacts folders appears; choose the one containing your merge data and click OK. Your data file appears in the Mail Merge Recipients dialog box, where you can review it to make sure everything's in order (if you find errors, you'll need to return to Outlook, fix the errors there, and then reselect the folder from the Mail Merge task pane).

Click OK and click Next: Write Your E-mail Message. Because you've already written your message, you now need to add the merge fields. Position your cursor where you want your first merged item to appear and under Write Your E-mail Message, click More Items. In the Insert Merge Field dialog box, select the field you want to insert in the current location, click Insert, and then click Close. Repeat the steps to position the remaining fields in the appropriate positions in your message.

When you're finished, save the document. Then click Next: Preview Your E-Message. Notice that the merge fields you inserted have been replaced by the information in your first data file record. To preview messages for the remaining records, click the double-arrow buttons under Preview Your E-mail Messages. If the data in any message doesn't look right, click Exclude This Recipient to remove that message from the emailing. You can also click Edit Recipient List to sort the list differently or to include/exclude messages based on certain criteria. However, you cannot use it to edit actual information in the data files.

Send 'Em

When you're satisfied with the mailing, click Next: Complete The Merge. Under Merge, click Electronic Mail. In the Merge To E-mail dialog box, leave To: set to Email_Address; this will put each person's email address into the To field of his or her message. In the Subject Line box, enter the subject line you want to appear in every email. In the Mail Format box, select the desired format and click OK.

You'll see a warning message that begins A Program Is Trying To Access E-mail Addresses You Have Stored In Outlook. This is the result of security features in Outlook to prevent a virus from sending itself to addresses in your Contacts folder. Click Allow Access For and choose a time from the adjacent list box. For all but the largest mailings, five minutes should be plenty.

Click OK, and you'll see another warning: A Program Is Trying To Automatically Send E-mail On Your Behalf. Do You Want To Allow This? Click Yes and then click it again for each and every message you need to send. When the last message is sent (that is, when you stop seeing warnings), Outlook sends the customized emails to each person in the data file. You can watch this happening for yourself if you like. Switch to Outlook, look in the Outbox folder, and watch the emails leave.

If the process doesn't go smoothly (for example, if the messages don't seem to leave your Outbox), you may have a conflict between the merge process and your antivirus program's email scanning feature. If your antivirus program allows it, turn off scanning of outgoing messages and try the merge again. If that doesn't work, turn off all email scanning and retry the merge. Remember to turn email scanning back on after Outlook sends the messages.

Diamond In The Rough

Repetitious warnings and conflicts with antivirus software aren't the only hints that Office's email merge is still a work in progress. For example, you can also send merged email via Outlook Express, but it limits you to plain text and you can't use an Outlook Express folder as a data file. (You have to export the folder to another file format. We found this through trial and error as the Mail Merge Wizard offers no guidance in this regard.) Also, Word has a Mail Merge toolbar that speeds up some parts of the merge process and provides handy access to Word fields you can use to further automate customization. For some reason, though, the toolbar provides no button for opening an Outlook contacts folder.

Let's hope that Microsoft enhances email merge in the next release or two (or issues a patch that smoothes out some of the rough spots). In the meantime, though, the feature is still worth learning and using.