As far as I know you can't mail merge an email database with a
standard email, addressing each email to a different recipient etc,
using GOOGLE APPS.

That would be a perfect feature to add to Google Apps. Then you could
create 1 email and address it directly to each person in your address
book on Google with out the need to CC or BCC.

Sometimes I am asked to clean up an email list with thousands of
emails where the
client needs the Names and the actual emails, I suspect to do some
mail merging.

CC and BCC'ing a bunch of cold contacts is out of the question now
days. And doing this with contacts out of your immediate area is
really considered spam on all levels.

So Mail merging to personalize emails to the recipient is getting much
more popular than the old "BLIND COPY" techniques.

However when you do a search for Mail Merge you get a different
version as far as what Google Apps considers Mail Merging.

According to Microsoft and most Office software or database supplier
who provide Mail Merging abilities in their software, its how you
personalize a single email to hundreds of recipients by creating a
"name" field within the email and have it address that recipient
directly, as it will do all of the records in your database that have
a first name field and an email field.

According to Google Mail Merging is combining your existing emails
from your local mail server to your address book in your Google Apps
account.

Obviously importing email contacts is not "Mail Merging".

Mail Merging is an academic. It requires a tad bit of database
knowledge. Because each record in the database contains various fields
( not just the first name and email fields) that can be utilized for
specific email recipients.

Example:

When you get your phone bill every month, it contains certain pieces
of information that your neighbor does not have on his phone bill.
Like name, address, calls made, or balance due.

Yet the phone bill looks the same as your pal next door if he's using
the same phone service.

Its because the bill IS the same, with the only difference being the
data extracted from their database that holds your account.

So now imagine you sending out standard email using this same
principle that the emails are the same but the data being pulled from
the database is different... data like the email address and first
name for example.

So you could address an email to someone specific and include only
their data from their record in your database, and the rest of the
email will look the same.

Here's the kicker.... only that recipient sees the information from
the database that contains their data while oter recipients only see
their data, etc, but the standard part of the email looks the same.

So the first paragraph you address it directly to that person. The 2nd
paragraph could be the rest of the email that everyone sees the same.

All of this running from Outlook takes about 10 to 15 minutes to send
out hundreds of emails once its setup.

This is great for sending out invitations to events, advertisements,
news letters, etc. And it always looks like you addressed the person
directly.

If you have the Microsoft Office Package on your PC, then you have
everything you need to start your contact database, send out merged
emails to your clients. The tools are sitting right under your nose.

There are stand alone email bulk senders that merge database contacts
into emails as well. Some Google searching will point you in the right
direction.

Hope this helps...

forgive me for typing so fast s there maybe a few typos in this
post... sorry.

Tokyo IT Support, Tokyo