1. Check with your ISP and make sure that they allow you to send out large amounts of email at one time and also watch how many go out in an hour. Comcast stops your mass email after 100. You have to send only 99 at a time and that is about the limit per hour. Knology turns off your ability to send ANY email for a few hours based on how many emails you send per hour also but we believe the limit to be 200. The whole association office could not send email for 4 hours one time after sending out a mass email.

2. Log in to the MLS. Look under Search for Rosters. At the bottom of the Roster screen, right click on "Download Full Roster". Click on Save Target As and download the roster. By default the file will be called roster.txt. Pay attention to where the file is being saved. Most often it is going to go to My Documents or Desktop. You can place it in a directory of your choice.

3. Open Microsoft Excel and click on the Open File command. By default Excel is only showing Excel file types so you need to look at the bottom of the Open File window and choose to show TEXT files. Go to the place where you saved the roster.txt file and click on it to open the file. When you open the file Excel will recognize that the file is a text file and will run the Text Import Wizard. Just click NEXT and then FINISH.

4. EXTREMELY IMPORTANT STEP! You must sort the spreadsheet on the next to the last column labeled: AllowMLSuserEmail (column AA). Once sorted it is a simple step to delete all the records that have said "NO" or "N" in that column. They have not given you permission to send them email and you should not do so. Now you sort by the Agent email address column. Delete the column label (since it is not an email address) and then go down the alphabetical list to a small group of emails that say "no_email" and delete those. Finally, click on the top of the column to select all of the email addresses and COPY (go to Edit menu and click on Copy).

5. Open Outlook Express or Outlook and right click in BCC; Paste. **DO NOT PLACE THE EMAIL ADDRESSES IN THE TO: OR CC: FIELDS.** If you need help finding BCC: you should call us. Go to the top of Outlook Express and select "Check Names"; this will verify the addresses are in email format. Type a subject and a message in the body of the email and "SEND". Be patient it will take a minute or so to send some 1400 emails.

There are alternatives to step number 5. You could use one of the online bulk email services available today on the internet. Some that we have seen used recently are StreamSend.com, ConstantContact.com and PinPointMail.com. You could also download World Merge from ColoradoSoft.net. This software will send out the email individually or in small groups of any size you specify and at any interval you would like. This also gives you the option of personalizing each email with the agent information that is in the Roster.