Creating a mailing list in exchange?

[Punkrulz]

Hey guys,

I've been tasked with the tedious task of extracting all of the email addresses out of an Access Database, and creating a mailing list with the information so that when a user selects the contact, it goes to all of their email addresses. I need to do this server side. Is this possible?

I know it is possible to create a distribution list using already existing contacts in Active Directory... but that's not what I'm trying to accomplish in this part. I'm using email addresses for numerous businesses throughout the township. A part of me feels that this is not a possible feat to accomplish with ADU&C... and that I would have to look for some external mailing list. Am I right?

 

[fitz]

you could create contacts for each outside email/user and create distribution groups for said contacts.

If you wanted to save yourself some time depending on how many entries are in the database, you could script out a solution to pull the info out of the the database, connect to AD and create the contacts and either add it to an existing distribution group or create a new group.

 

[Punkrulz]

Yeah you're definitely right Fitz, my friend had previously done the same thing, but in the case he was working on he only had to do about 20 or so Chief's email addresses for our county... I have hundreds of email addresses to go through to do this on.

Unfortunately I don't even know where to begin with the script on making it go in, get the first name / last name (or business name), and email address of each row (If there is one) to do that... I feel as though I'm definitely going to have to do this by hand.

If this were SQL I'm sure I could figure out how to pull out the information I need specifically and display it by rows, and if not I know a bunch of people who know SQL who could help me... For me, Access is a whole other beast.

Thanks for the idea though!

 

[fitz]

it's really the same thing.. you can use SQL queries in access. Just need the proper connection string.. it should go without saying that you'll need to know the database scheme (tables/fields you want to pull) and the proper way to write a SQL query to pull the information you want.