Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook] wrote:
I don't understand this-- why do distribution lists have limited
usefullness?

The amount of effort involved in maintaining a distribution list of even moderate size can be considerable (and tedious).

This is my whole point. If each user has to maintain their own
distribution lists, they will mostly be out of sync. It's not that big
a deal for myself or another network admin to add new employees or
remove them when they leave. It only amounts to a couple of additions
and deletions per month. And if the lists are shared, it only has to be
done once and all the users automatically have the correct lists.


What besides a distribution list would I use to send email
to specific groups of people?

a) Mail merge
b) Select contacts, choose Actions | New Message to Contact

Unless I am not seeing something here, you apparently do not understand
how things are done at businesses in the real world. If I tell our
users that each time they need to send an email to a particular group,
they will need to go into contacts and select each person in the list
or they need to maintain their own lists I can assure you that I will
soon be out of a job.

As for mail merge, well, where is the list supposed to come from and
who maintains it?



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.

Only distribution lists in Active Directory (i.e. what you see in the Global Address List) can have permissions set on them. Folders get folder-level permissions, not item-level permissions.

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.

They must not know much about how users actually use DLs.

This I agree with.

Bill