Outlook competing with mail merge data source

[Karen]

I was instructed to post this question in the Outlook
Newsgroup as the Mail Merge Newsgroup did not have a
solution.

I am using Office 2003 so Word, Excel and Outlook are
2003. It is a simple email merge with one merge field:
<First Name>. The data source is an Excel spreadsheet
with email address, first name, last name and company
name.

I open up the merge document and the data source and can
preview the merged letters. I then merge to email and
change mail format to plain text and click OK. Then I get
dialog boxes trying to match my email addresses with ones
in my Outlook address book. If the person in the Excel
list is called Ann and I have an Ann in my address book,
it sends the email to the Ann in the address book not the
Ann in the data source. These emails are sent only to
recipients whose first name happen to reside in my
address book. The data source emails are not sent. Aside
from the fact that the new security settings in Outlook
2003 now require that I click OK to approve each email
(which I bypassed with a utility) now I have this problem
with the data source. Frankly, my IT guy does not know
how to fix the problem other than to uninstall Office
2003 and install Office 2000.

Any assistance would be appreciated to fix this problem.

Thank you,

Karen

 

[Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]]

This is just a guess because I've never tried your scenario, but don't you
think a merge to electronic mail would expect to find your merge data in
your electronic mail program? I suspect that is what's happening.
Any reason you can't use Outlook as your data source, even if it means
importing this Excel spreadsheet into an Outlook folder?
BTW, if you set your format to HTML you can avoid those prompts.