Maintain Outlook Distribution List from Access

  • Thread starter Thread starter SoCal Rick
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SoCal Rick

Hi,

I have Outlook distribution lists of up to 1,000 members. The membership

changes (to some degree) each month. I have a MS Access database which

compares the list of people who were on the list last month to the list of

people who should be in the distribution list this month. It identifies

people to remove from the distribution list and people to add to the

distribution list. Is there a good way to use MS Access VBA to automatically

make these changes to the distribution lists?

For example, last month Tony (and 145 other people) were part of the

1stComplaintHandler Email list, but have moved to other responsibilities, so

shouldn't recevie any more email for that group. At the same time, Joan (and

43 other people) have joined the group that handles 1st Complaints, so they

should be added to the email group "1stComplaintHandler".

Any help is greatly appreciated (suggestions or even articles to read...)

Thank you

SoCal Rick
 
Maintaining DLs is a nightmare in the making. I don't recommend using them

at all, except for small, relatively static ones.

You could, in theory, write Access VBA code using the Outlook object model

to work with the properties and methods of the DistListItem object and do

updates. (Whether you'll be interrupted by security prompts depends on your

Outlook version, which you should always mention when posting to an Outlook

forum.) However, better solutions for mass mailings exist, including Word

mail merge directly from your database.

Sue Mosher

"SoCal Rick" <SoCalRick> wrote in message

news:88644659-B6DC-474B-A747-C2CB94F24D41@microsoft.com...
> Hi,
> I have Outlook distribution lists of up to 1,000 members. The membership
> changes (to some degree) each month. I have a MS Access database which
> compares the list of people who were on the list last month to the list of
> people who should be in the distribution list this month. It identifies
> people to remove from the distribution list and people to add to the
> distribution list. Is there a good way to use MS Access VBA to
> automatically
> make these changes to the distribution lists?
> For example, last month Tony (and 145 other people) were part of the
> 1stComplaintHandler Email list, but have moved to other responsibilities,
> so
> shouldn't recevie any more email for that group. At the same time, Joan
> (and
> 43 other people) have joined the group that handles 1st Complaints, so
> they
> should be added to the email group "1stComplaintHandler".
> Any help is greatly appreciated (suggestions or even articles to read...)
> Thank you
> SoCal Rick
 
Hi Sue,

First, thank you for responding to my question.

The Outlook version we use is Outlook 2003(11.8313.8221) SP3. I do most of

my work in Excel and Access, so I don't have much experience with Outlook.

An option available, but I haven't tried it with this quantity, is to

maintain the mailing lists in the Access database. When the user wants to

send a message to everyone on this list, they could have a prompt for the

message and other critical information, then I could open an instance of

Outlook and fill in the "To" and "CC" based on the database. This would

avoid maintaining the DLs in Outlook, however, it would limit the users of

these special lists to people who have access to the MS Access database.

Since there are only a couple of people, this is doable.

I should explain how this is used. We get a download of temporary

assignments for a few thousand people every month. We classify these people

into groups based on information from the database. Then we compare the

results to the prior month's results to determine changes in assignment. We

print out lists of changes and someone has the task of going into Outlook and

modifying the contacts accordingly.

My thought was there must be a way to simplify this so once the updated

information is available, we could automatically update it. When you

mentioned using mail merge in Word, it drove me to think of sending the email

directly from the Access database. This is something I do for some of our

users now, but the mail lists are not very big (up to 20 receipients).

So your thoughts or directions to look at other sources are extremely

valuable to me and I do appreciate your time and expertise.

Thank you,

Rick
 
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