Taking this one step further I found that once you have a blank message with
all the e-mails for you category. You can
Go back to Contacts/Action/New Distribution List
Copy all the e-mail addresses from the To in the blank message ( I found
that it works best if you start the selection from the end)
Select Members in Distribution list and then paste the list in Member in the
new window. Name it and save it

Joe

"Jack S." wrote:

First - I am using OL 2002 sp3 and can only speak to that program.
It seems you want to send an email to an entire category, yes? If so, a
distribution list is not the way to go.
View your contacts in the "by category" view. Click on the category header,
then select ACTIONNEW MESSAGE TO CONTACT - the result will be a new, blank
email message with all contacts from that category inlcuded in the TO field.
1. If every contact does not have a valid email address, you will get a
message telling you that OL will insert their name as a place holder and you
will have to go into the list of addresses in the email and edit out the
names or replace with a valid email address - not very good.
2. However, if you add an email field to the contacts view "by category";
sort by the email field, [click on the field header] which collects all the
contacts with emails into a contiguous list. Shift-click to quickly select
all contacts with emails - then create email as above, only contacts with
email addresses [those that you just selected] will be included in the TO
field, so no editing necessary.
3. If you want to maintain some privacy of who is receiving the message,
cut/paste the addresses from TO into the BCC field and send the message to
yourself [TO] - then no one else will see the full address list.


--
Jack S


"AMW" wrote:

I am trying to create email distibution lists using the categories in
contacts but cannot find how to do it. Can you enlighten me please?

"Jack S." wrote:

By reading thses posts I learned how to send an remail to an entire catagory
list in OL 2002 SP3 [Win XP SP2]
However, not all my contacts in a catagory have email addesses. WhenI try to
send an email to the entire list, OL informs me that ther are some without
email address and the name will be used as a placeholder - for me to correct
later. In some cases [but not consistently] OL will insert the business fax
address when an email is not available for a contact.
If I try to send the email without editing/corrrecting these items, OL asks
to creat e a new account or correct the contact - if I select no - the emite
message is aborted.

Is there any way to instruct OL simply to ignore any contact that does not
have an email address, or have it take some other action [isolate the
"offending" contacts] rather than not sending the message to the 90% who DO
have a valid email address? - Seems like this would be the logical result -
not making me edit lists which might be hundreds long - and get it wrong and
the entire message still does not go - very frustrating
--
Jack S