Sue,
Thank you for your reply.

Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook] wrote:
First of all, distribution lists have limited usefulness. They make sense only for very small, static distributions.


I don't understand this-- why do distribution lists have limited
usefullness? What besides a distribution list would I use to send email
to specific groups of people?

Second, the better solution would have been to create a public folder, not another mailbox. All the hosted Exchange services that I know can handle that.


I can look into this. As long as the distribution lists in the public
folders can be used in the address book _and_ the distribution lists
can have permissions set on them then I assume this solution will work
fine. Unfortunately, I don't know a lot about Exchange. At this company
as well as where I worked before, we network folks are kept isolated
form the Exchange side of things and we need to ask the outsourcing
company for every modification. I had called them and asked the best
way to share distribution lists amonst our engineers and this
"functional mailbox" solution was the one I was told is the best way.

Third, the procedure for adding another user's Contacts folder to a profile's address book is complicated because of the architecture of the Outlook Address Book service. And that procedure won't work at all in Outlook 2007.


For now, that's not a problem for us. Our company is so far behind we
only converted from NT 4.0 and Outlook 2000 this year. ;-)

Thanks.
Bill