• PC World
• »Software
• »Browsers & Add-Ons

E-mail is a terrific way to get an important message out to lots of people fast. But spam has made Internet service providers wary of mail addressed to a multitude of recipients. I recently tried to send a communication to several hundred members of a group I'm associated with. My ISP sent the message to a handful of the addressees, dumped the rest, and sent me an error message that listed, incorrectly, who had and who had not received my message. In short, it was a mess.

Most e-mail services limit the number of addresses you can stuff into your outgoing messages' To:, Cc:, and Bcc: fields (the last is the masked "blind carbon copy" option). You may be restricted to as few as 100, 50, or even 25 addresses in these three fields combined. Some companies also throttle your overall e-mail output: Generate more than 1000 messages a day through your Comcast account, for example, and the ISP will freeze it for 24 hours, on the assumption that your PC has been infected by spam-spewing malware.

Make a Distribution List

You can circumvent these limitations. If you communicate primarily with people in your e-mail program's contacts list or address book, split the entries into mailing-list groups whose numbers stay under your service's limits. In Outlook 2003 and 2007, for example, select Contacts, and choose Actions, New Distribution List to create such a list. To do the same thing in Outlook Express 6, click Addresses to open the Address Book, and select File, New Group. In Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5, choose Address Book, New List. One simple way to split up lists is to group them alphabetically--A to L and M to Z, for example.