[Bob]

Also, if anyone has come up with a solution that doesn't involve going with
an add-on or another product entirely, please post it. I'd love to see this
problem resolved in a better way.


"Bob" wrote:

I've been having the exact same problem, and I've found that it isn't just
limited to Office 2007; I've seen the same behavior on a machine with Office
2003.

I've researched this problem in depth 3 times now, including posting the
issue here twice, and I haven't found even an inkling of reason as to how to
resolve this problem. I goofed around with a few things that seem to help,
but Word still hangs frequently whenever we try to send out a large mail
merge. I'll post these tweaks below.

I'm just glad to see that finally my company isn't the only one experiencing
this problem. It's one of the most frustrating troubleshooting issues I've
had to deal with. The problem happens so randomly that's near impossible to
find any fix that works consistently. Using 2007, you start a mail merge
(using the lovely ribbon now), select recipients (we always use an Excel file
as the source), click Finish and Merge, type a subject, and send as HTML
(sending as Plain Text is a whole other issue). Sometimes we'll get through
thousands of e-mail without a problem, sometimes we won't get through 2
without crashing... again and again and again. I tried this on 3 different
machines, one with Office 2007, one with Office 2003. Both experienced the
same problem. I then tried a mail merge with a cleanly formatted machine with
a fresh install of XP and Office 2007. Again, the EXACT same problem. Theres
no rhyme or reason to it. I dont know whats causing the problem, only that,
at one point, it was working beautifully, and at the next, PLOP. I suspect
that Windows updates are the cause of this problem. We didnt make any other
company-wide installs during this period when mail merge stopped working.

So this leaves us users with the following options:
1) Wait for Microsoft to first of all acknowledge this as a problem, then
release an update that will fix it. I'm not holding my breath for this one,
but I'm sure it will happen eventually.

or,

2) Use an alternative product. I toyed around with Open Office as they also
have a mail merge feature, but I could never get it to work. However, I just
came across the following add-on tool: Mail Merge Toolkit
(http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/mail_merge/). This tool, among other things,
says that it makes merging more "reliable in operation." I purchased one
license for my company and so far it seems to be working. We sent out a mail
merge with 10,000 recipients this afternoon and it didn't crash once; no way
would we have had this kind of consistency using Word alone. Really it's
rather ridiculous that we ended up having to pay to get this feature to work
when we should have had it to begin with, but the Toolkit is relatively cheap
and at this point I'll take it if it works. And its a miracle if it does.
Weve been having this problem for months and Im at my wits end. I honestly
recommend this tool to anyone whos experiencing this problem.


Here are the tweaks I was using before I found this tool if anyone is
interested and doesn't feel like shelling out any money for this problem:

1) Keep Outlook open and set it to Work Offline. Any interruptions such as
Send/Receive attempts seems to bring about a crash. Disable your network
connection if you have to.
2) Don't save the Word document you're using for the mail merge. Copy your
e-mail text into a new document, DON'T SAVE IT, and execute the mail merge
from there. Don't ask me why this affects anything, but it does.
3) If you're sending out a large number of e-mails (in the thousands), break
your source file down into chunks of about 1000, maybe 2000 records.

Also, I only ever used Excel as a source file, so I don't know how well this
system works with other data sources. If you're still having problems, try
converting your data source to an Excel file. Saved as a 2003 or 2007
version. It doesn't seem to matter.


I hope some of this helps those of you who are still experiencing this
frustrating problem.





"wg_tech" wrote:

we are using Office 2007, trying to do a word email merge to send to a large
number of email addresses. We will not run into the spam issues because we
are sending only to in-house email addrs directly from exchange acct to
others.

Word stops responding (hangs) during the merge, we originally thought to
many for Word to handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same
problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. So
there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and other have
similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task
machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session.

Any information is greatly appreciated.