How to Send Mail to a Personal Distribution List (PDL) ?

Hi friends,

Though we can send mails to Individual addresses, I wonder what would be the Syntax to specify in the script task or Format to specify in a "To" Property of Send Mail task that I use to Send a mail to my Personal Distribution List (PDL).

Thanks

Subhash Subramanyam

You cannot do this using the SMTP Mail Task, because SMTP does not have personal lists. That is a feature of your "mail box", and comes with technologies like MAPI and mail servers. You do not want MAPI I assure you, it is horrific to use in a server environment.

Really you need to get a list created at the mail server level, or just send to all people using individual addresses.

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Hi Friends,

Surely I accept to the ideas of experts' reply here.

Thanks to dipendra baghel, who found a custom component "nsoftware send email task".

But solution for the Send Mail task to work is right here: When we create a PDL, The exchange server creates a valid address which can route to list of address in PDL.(say, sdfds@. sdd.com) . This address can be fed into "To" property in Send Mail Task

Thanks to my colleagues Sunil Gidwani, Dipendra Baghel and Prashanth Tiwari for their support

Thanks

Subhash Subramanyam

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Thanks for your reply, Darren.

I understood here that PDL is a feature of mailbox having MAPI Technology or other Mail Servers.

So I'd rather wish that in the future verison of SSIS, Send mail task should have an option to import addresses from a csv file or address book and should help us allow grouping that help customize broadcasting (Says incase of Newsletters, Alerting the Teams etc)

Thanks

Subhash Subramanyam

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As you mentioned in the answer to this post, groups and mailing lists are a function of the email server, not of the task sending the mail. If you want to send to a group of people via the SMTP task, you can already either set up a group email alias on your mail server, or read an external list, and use a script to put a series of email addresses in the To: property on the SMTP task.

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Distribution lists can be defined in a personal MAPI "mailbox", in fact it worked for that in the old SQL Mail or DTS Send Mail task, but MAPI is absolute pants in an unattended envrionment., and I cannot stress that enough. You had to install Outlook on your server to get it, and the only version that worked reliably was Outlook 2000. MAPI is owned my the office team, and they have a different focus. They effectively broke MAPI to SMTP delivery in one release, you had to leave Outlook running on the server!

So do not wish for MAPI is my message, you would regret it!

Importing a CSV for sending mail, ma I point out that we have SSIS, see the Flat File source, the recordset desination, and the for each loop. Using those components and tasks you can drive a email list off a CSV file and mail each address. It is not the simplest method, but then SSIS is not supposed to be a bulk mailer. What about featues like unsubscribe and other list management features? Use the right tool for the job I is what I mean. If bulk mail features are too much, then just use the standard mail server itself, they all support distribution lists much better than SSIS or MAPI ever will.