Help How to add a CC to each mail merge email in Outlook - tearing my hair out !

[reluctantlogin]

Hi there. I am hoping someone can help.
I need to send a mail merge with an attached letter , say to 500 people via Outlook. I need each email I send to be copied to one other email address (a cc email). The second email address is the same in all cases . So - Dear John cc Fred - see attached letter, Dear Lucy cc Fred see attached letter, Dear Jane cc Fred see attached lettered etc etc
I cannot work out how to do this. I have tried Microsoft support but they just keep telling me how to do the mail merge and not the CC.

Im hoping someone can help !! Thanks a lot

Not sure if you can do this in regular old Word sadly. I have used something called the Mail Merge Toolkit by Mapilabs in the past where I had to do bulk mailouts with merged PDFs - it costs money though, not sure what their pricing is like now but if you do a lot of complex mail merges it would be worth having

I was about to say something similar to @Biscuitlover456 . I had a look on YouTube and Kevin-from-Microsoft (who is very good at this sort of thing) has a video on it

This uses a third party tool as well, it's this one, which is free to download: https://mergetoolsaddin.com/ but the question is whether you would be allowed to install it on a work machine.

I would personally use Power Automate to do this but you may not be comfortable having a go at it.

Can't be done out of the box. MSFT documentation will tell you the limitations if you need evidence for boss. Needs paid extension as PP says. Or write your own automation, but time and arse ache would likely mean a paid ext is way more cost effective.

Found this workaround online - not sure if it would help?

"I was having the same trouble , but then i found out a simple solution to this. but my CC is always the same and not different if its different then my reply wont work.

Once you are done with mail merge go to outlook and follow the below steps
Goto rules in your outlook and click manage rules, then create new rule and then select the bottom end option apply rule on message i send and then click next by clicking next you will find a option CC the message to people or public group then click finish, this will make any mail you send the CC will be always there for the contacts you have selected as CC and then go to the mail merge file and complete mail merge.

Note, remove the rule once your done with mail merge or this will send all the emails with CC to them."

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/how-to-cc-in-mail-merge-using-word-and-excel/339446e1-a4ee-4c9e-90cd-9bbd8de9e686

Kevin does explain how to do it with Power Automate

But I agree with @Mochinated on the arse ache involved!

Wow Mumsnetters - speedy support - thanks SO much - will try suggestions !

Yes, it's a very simple task with Mail Merge Toolkit app:

Hello all,

I got the following answer from Microsoft in case it helps anyone else :
Hello

Thank you for the information.

On outlook application click on Files>Manage rules>New rule>select apply this rule on messages I send.

Note: this will apply only to message you send that meets the conditions you want to set on the rule based on the mail merge alone and not all messages sent using outlook

Select a condition such as if the subject or word in the body or any condition that meets the emails content in the mail merge > Click on Next>Select CC the message to people and select the people (ensure the people you want to CC already exist in your outlook contact)> skip the except condition by clicking on Next and Click on Finish.

This should CC the email to these specified in the rule based on the condition you have set.

Let me know if you still need further assistance.

Looks good @reluctantlogin - that's the same workaround @FloralShirt posted, I think. If you can make the rule unique to the mail merge (e.g. very specific subject line you won't use for anything else) there's no need to delete the rule again afterwards, although it certainly seems safer to do so.