Send Individual Messages to Distribution List Members

My company maintains a large email address list and often needs to send mail to hundreds of people. After evaluating several techniques, I settled on using the Microsoft Exchange Event Service to send messages to many different distribution lists (DLs). Here are the solutions I considered and rejected, the technique I developed, and some tips to make the process run smoothly. I'm grateful to Sue Mosher for elaborating on the process and for making other suggestions that improved the article.

Rejected Options
My first idea for managing large mailings to diverse recipients—to cut and paste all the addresses into the To field of a message—wasn't efficient. Another idea was to use a UNIX script that sends mail using a legacy UNIX box, but this process was very slow and hard for the administrative assistant to administer. When my company implemented Exchange Server, I considered creating custom recipients in the Global Address List (GAL) and then adding them to DLs. I decided against this approach, because mailings go to thousands of addresses that change often, and the company didn't want to give the administrative assistant permission to add, remove, or modify accounts on the Exchange server. I also wanted each message to be addressed to the individual recipient, not to an impersonal DL name. . . .