Question about Microsoft Outlook emails

[tallyho8]

Since the TBN members seem to know everything I am posting this question here and hoping someone can give me an answer without being too technical.

I created a special folder in my Outlook that contains emails from about 800 people that I have dealt with in an online business. I now want to send an email to these 800 people but their addresses are not in my address book and I do not want to have to type in 800 names. Is there a way to get these 800 email addresses out of my folder and into my address book or another way to send them all an email without having to look up and type in each address?

 

[Scooby074]

I used to support outlook. As far as I know there is no way to extract email addresses from a folder of emails and input them into your contact lists so you can do a mass mail built directly into outlook. THere are ways to do though, like exporting your folder as .xls and searching through manually, copying and pasting the addresses into a text file, then import the data back into outlook or writing a macro, but these are pretty advanced and can be time consuming.

THere are, however 3rd party (unsupported by microsoft) products out there that will do the work for you. Just google "extract addresses outlook folder pst" and youll get a whole bunch of apps to try. Such as http://www.clearcontext.com/products/ or http://www.brothersoft.com/outlook-email-address-extractor-pro-24819.html Use these products at your own risk!! and back up your pst before starting. Alot of companies charge for these products because besides having legitimate, uses they're invaluable to spammers.

You should be warned though, a mass mailing of 800 emails will likely get you marked as a spammer or as being infected by a virus. Some ISP's will cut you off, till you explain whats up. (they usually told customers to call people like me, rather than admit that they were being blocked) Just a heads up/

 

[jdbower]

As another word of advice, if you send out a mass emailing I wouldn't recommend putting everyone in the "To" or "CC" fields. For basic group emails where not everyone knows each other I send a message to myself and "BCC" everyone else. This hides their emails from the other recipients and protects their privacy a bit.

For 800 recipients you may want to look into some dedicated mailing list software that can help do things like print a "To unsubscribe click here" message, control people who opt in/opt out, and maybe even ease ISP woes by either using public email servers or sending out the emails one at a time over the course of the day.

 

[allenr]

As another word of advice, if you send out a mass emailing I wouldn't recommend putting everyone in the "To" or "CC" fields. For basic group emails where not everyone knows each other I send a message to myself and "BCC" everyone else. This hides their emails from the other recipients and protects their privacy a bit.

I was blissfully unaware of that difference. Do you happen to know what 'CC" and "BCC" are abbreviations for. (probably bad grammar, I think "for" is a preposition)

 

[LMTC]

carbon copy
blind carbon copy

I hate it when one of my vendors mass mails and does NOT BCC. It lets everyone else on the list see who does business with them, and I think that information should be between us and the vendor. We BCC anything that gets mailed to a group of people unless we KNOW that they are all aware they are part of whatever group it is.

 

[tallyho8]

Thanks! A lot of good advice here.

 

[Knotbored]

In outlook express if you right click on an incomming email one option is "add sender to adress book" I guess after its in your adress book you can asemble your mailing list.
I also hate receiving emails with hundreds of other folks adresses and dislike exposing my email location to anyone else. The BCC I believe stands for blind copy.
Also those huge lists are food for spammers-they just click "reply to all"-If I were you I would consider some alternate way to inform those 800 folks if you want to stay on their good side.

 

[MossRoad]

You could export all of the e-mails from Outlook to an Excel file(as mentioned) then save it as a text file. Then you could search the text file for any word with an @ sign in it and append it to the end of a second text file. That second text file will contain a list of all the e-mail addresses.

 

[srjones]

Since the TBN members seem to know everything I am posting this question here and hoping someone can give me an answer without being too technical.

I created a special folder in my Outlook that contains emails from about 800 people that I have dealt with in an online business. I now want to send an email to these 800 people but their addresses are not in my address book and I do not want to have to type in 800 names. Is there a way to get these 800 email addresses out of my folder and into my address book or another way to send them all an email without having to look up and type in each address?

What version of Outlook? (Outlook 2003, 2007, or Outlook Express)?

Some good advice has been given WRT extracting the addresses. Also, since it sounds like a commercial endeavor, you might want to read up on the following:

CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
and
CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nothing to fear, but just a few things to be aware of.

 

[tallyho8]

I have sent all my emails now. I purchased Outlook Add-In from Sperry Solutions for $25 and it scanned my special folder for all the email addresses and placed them in a special contact list that I used for the emails. I only emailed 40 people at a time and addressed the emails to myself and BCCed the others.

These were all previous customers of mine who I felt might have lost contact and lost my web site or email and needed reminders. I enclosed a note telling them how to reply to the email to be removed from my mailing list. I probably won't use the list more often that every year or two.

Out of 800 emails, 200 came back as undeliverable, which shows how often people change email addresses. I have already had 14 people reply and reorder and 12 others reply thanking me for the update as they had lost my contact info.

The last time I contacted my customers about 2 years ago was by mail and the 800 letters cost me about $400 plus a lot of time. This time only $25 and much less time was involved. I hate spam and do not email out ads to people who are not already my customers. The web has definitely helped out the small business owner by making their advertising and mailing costs much cheaper and have helped us hold our own against the big box stores.

Thanks to all for your suggestions.