[Peter Jamieson]

OK, I had made a different set of assumptions.


Do you know if this is an OFFICE problem, or something
relative to any/all mailmerge-email programs?


The reality is that you cannot rely on either a plain text or HTML
communication being displayed as you would like by your recipient's e-mail
client software, for reasons we can discuss if you really want to. The best
you can do is to try to target the e-mail clients and settings most used by
your recipients.

For my part, I can't offer good experience in this area, but...

As far as I know, when you merge to e-mail using HTML format in Word, you
have very little control over the MIME-format message that is eventually
sent. If you need more control, you probably need to look for 3rd-party
solutions, and I can't help you there (you may be able to find one or two
such solutions by using google groups to search this group, or simply by
searching the web).

You /might/ be able to do slightly better by merging to an output document
then e-mailing the result using Outlook. However, even in that case, as far
as I can tell you have little control over what Outlook puts in its
MIME-format messages.

Incidentally, as far as I can tell, even Word 2003's "plain text" e-mails
are actually sent as "HTML" e-mails, which may well cause additional
problems if your recipients have older e-mail clients.

Sorry I can't give you more definitive answers.

Peter Jamieson


"melisa" wrote in message
...
2 versions of the message is an impossibility, since we do not know who
receives in plain text and who receives html. It needs to be one format
that
is "readable" to all. Do you know if this is an OFFICE problem, or
something
relative to any/all mailmerge-email programs? Certainly, beautiful were
the
days when we could simply choose to mail merge in plain text without being
blocked by security measures we had no control of. I almost (almost) want
to
go back to Office 2000...

thanks for any comments/other suggestions...

"Peter Jamieson" wrote:

I don't think there are any simple facilities within Word that will help
you
with this. If I were doing it, I'd probably just maintain two versions of
the mail merge main document, one for plain text, and one for HTML.

The only other approach I'd even consider is doing a version for HTML
where
I used { IF } fields to include/exclude material that I wanted in HTML
but
not the text version, using the value of a bookmark to decide what to
include/exclude. Just some untested thoughts:

e.g. you might have something like the following, where PM means
"paragraph mark"

{ SET htmlversion "Y" }

sample paragraph of text followed by a paragraph mark.PM
{ IF "{ REF htmlversion \*upper }" = "N" "PMPM" "" }

and so on...

When doing the HTML version, you use { SET htmlversion "Y" }
When doing the plaintext version, you use { SET htmlversion "N" }

Or you use an ASK field to do the same.

Peter Jamieson


"melisa" wrote in message
...
We need to be able to create html mail merges from Word to Outlook 2002
so
that recipients who read only plain text email do not visualize extra
Hard
Returns (blank lines) not included in the html text.

For ex, currently what happens is: a single spaced paragraph followed
by a
Hard Return and followed with an additional Hard Return (blank line
between
paragraphs) shows up on the receiving end with 3 blank lines between
paragraphs instead of 1.

Ideas on how we can resolve? Email must be "readable"/"attractive" for
both
html and plain text recipients. ...help... this "simple" problem is
killing
us.