sending to all contacts in outlook includes business fax as e-mail

[Pedro Esteban]

When you select all contacts in the e-mail list in order
to send a message to everybody, outlook will include not
only the e-mails, but if the contact has a business fax,
it will pick it up too, so if you send to a 1000 people,
you will get 1000 error messages back.
Is there a way to have outlook not select the business fax
entry but only the e-mail fields?

Outlook 2003 does the same thing!

Thanks

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP]]

Not unless you disable the fax number. Outlook considers fax numbers to be valid electronic addresses, since there are many client- and server-based components that can use such addresses.

One method to hide fax numbers from the address book is to prefix the fax number with one or more letters (maybe B for business fax, H for home, O for other). If the fax number begins with a letter, Outlook won't show it in the address book. This definitely works in Outlook 2000 and 2002.

At http://www.sperrysoftware.com/Outlook_Solutions.htm, you'll find a Hide Fax Numbers utility that adds a text prefix to fax numbers for all your contacts and removes it when you really do need to use a fax number in an Outlook message.

Another way to avoid avoid having fax numbers appear in the address book is simply not to enter data in the fax fields. Put fax numbers in some other (non-phone) fields.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Outlook and Exchange solutions at http://www.slipstick.com
Author of
Microsoft Outlook Programming: Jumpstart
for Administrators, Power Users, and Developers