[Tutor] creating distribution lists in outlook

[Pirritano, Matthew]

I appreciate the effort to help! 

I work for the county. If we were a business, or maybe just in better economic times maybe we could afford a program that does email distribution lists. I believe that is the way the companies probably deal with this.

Here's what Microsoft says about the size of outlook distribution lists:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/238569

Between 50 & 70 emails per list. That's just a limitation of outlook. At least outlook 2003.

On the other hand I have heard that Outlook 2007 might have dealt with this limitation. I will probably check that out. It does seem like the python solution is going to be too labor intensive. As with many such issues I thought it would be a fun challenge to see if I could get it to work. : )

Thanks for the help.
matt

Matthew Pirritano, Ph.D.
Research Analyst IV
Medical Services Initiative (MSI)
Orange County Health Care Agency
(714) 568-5648
-----Original Message-----
From: Luke Paireepinart [mailto:rabidpoobear at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 5:00 PM
To: Pirritano, Matthew
Cc: tutor at python.org
Subject: Re: [Tutor] creating distribution lists in outlook

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 6:32 PM, Pirritano, Matthew
<MPirritano at ochca.com> wrote:
> Here's the thing. You can import them all at once. But then you have
> 1000+ contacts in one contacts folder. When you create the distribution
> lists a number get cut off if you try to put too many into the list. But
> there is no indication of how many went into the list. And there are not
> row numbers or anything like it in the contacts folders. So you'd have
> to keep in mind how far you got and then choose the next set, and it
> would be way to labor intensive if you were to count to 50 and then do
> that again. It's easier to create 20 separate files and make
> corresponding lists.  But still takes a while.

Pardon me for continuing not to address your specific question, but
this seems like something that businesses would commonly run into and
I'd be very surprised if there's not a way around this already.
Is there really no way to have a group of more than 50?  Have you
tried creating distribution lists based on contact groups?  If this is
possible you could automatically add all contacts to one specific
group.

I really think there's a simple solution if you look into it, but I
don't have outlook, I use Thunderbird.

Are you able to use a plugin to perform the work or is that against
your company's policies?

I just don't see automating with COM being the cleanest / most robust
approach, but if you really want to try it hopefully we can help if
you run into any python-specific issues!
-Luke