I’d advise you to look beyond Outlook and other personal email browsers if you’re going to be sending more than a few dozen emails, or sending to a list on a periodic basis. Tools like Outlook have a number of substantial disadvantages.

First, putting lots of email addresses into the BCC field (the standard procedure for emailing a large, anonymous group) may cause your email to go straight to spam filters rather than the inbox. What’s more, if subscribers actively flag your emails as spam (which always happens with a big list of subscribers, regardless of how careful you are), you run the risk of being blacklisted as a spammer. This isn’t very likely, but it’s really, really bad if it happens – it would mean that none of your organization’s email (personal as well as mass emails) would go through. It can take weeks to get off a spammer blacklist. Professional broadcast emailing services manage their relationships directly with services like Hotmail and AOL to prevent being blacklisted. And even if your service was blacklisted, your personal email would still be unaffected.

There are other downsides as well. Any kind of formatting in Outlook – like an eNews layout – is unlikely to reach your subscribers as intended. And you’ll have to manually manage your list. There’s a lot of effort involved in adding new subscribers, deleting those who ask to be removed and monitoring returned emails—remember, you are legally responsible for removing those people who request it.

Outlook is a problematic way to send broadcast emails. If you’re sending emails to more than a few dozen people, there are better options

-Laura S. Quinn, Idealware www.idealware.org