David 0

David 0

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Opening Outlook and populating To box

Jan 13 2006 1:21 PM

I manage an intranet site for a manufacturing facility of about 500 employees. Oftentimes, I need to send an e-mail to all 500 employees. Other times I want to send an e-mail to employees in a certain department. All 500 employees e-mail addresses are in a company SQL database. The database also has their department. I have worked out all the code to query the database etc.

Once I have the list of e-mail address, ideally, what I would like to be able to do is click a button, have it open Outlook and populate the To field with the e-mail addresses I have queried. I will manually input the Subject and Body, although it would be nice to know how to do this also.

One thing I tried was to populate an anchor metatag using the mailto: parameter. But, I found out that the anchor metatag will only take about 1800 characters and that isn't even half the characters needed for my e-mail addresses.

What I ended up doing was populating a textbox control with the e-mail addresses. I then manually open an Outlook e-mail and then copy and paste the e-mail addresses from the textbox control to the Outlook To field. Although this works, it isn't so easy for my non-computer literate users to use. I'm using ASP.NET 1.1.

Anybody got any ideas? Thanks!