Perhaps the most popular article on the site explains how to send email to a bunch of people using Access and Outlook.

It has garnered its fair share of comments and emails, and one came in today that I figured I'd share and then elaborate on.

The mail reads (in part):

I have a following question: How to modify this module to be able to send messages to various mailing lists that I predefine in respective queries? In other words, I have in my database 3 categories of customers (in 3 different queries) andI want to address them with a different message. Do I need to create 3 macros running 3 modules each referring to a separate query with a given category of customers or is there another way to do it?

You don't have to create modules for each list, you just need to be able to tell the macro which query you want to use before running it.
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Talking about SMTP Connectors in an earlier post got me to thinking of another way we use the SMTP Connectors in Exchange.

A client has a (horribly behaved) legacy piece of software that, when faced with a customer with no email address on file, sends an email to an address it makes up in a legitimate domain. So, for a long time, they were bombarding this innocent third party domain with mail that was destined to go nowhere.

This was eating bandwidth, processing cycles and the like, so we tried to put an end to it by appealing to the developers. They were not interested in fixing the old program, it would continue to spit out its bogus mail.

We created an SMTP Connector in Exchange to handle delivery to the legitimate domain. (It should be noted that the domain probably wasn't legit when the program was written, but with the .com explosion, it became legit. It's also not a domain anyone would be sending mail to in the normal course of business... it's not like this is for AOL.COM or anything...)

We set the connector so in the "address space" we listed our desired domain. We checked off "Forward all mail thru this connector to the following smart hosts"

... and this is where we get tricky ...

... we put a non-routable IP address in the smart host field. (And remember to enclose the IP address in brackets - i.e., [10.99.99.88] )

On the Delivery Options tab, when it asks when it should deliver, we tell it to "Never Run"

And that does the trick. We no longer pester the legit domain, we don't eat any bandwidth, everyone's happy.

A client is constantly getting hit with email attacks, and one such attack flooded the Exchange box with a couple hundred bogus NDRs which were trying to be delivered.

Removing these queues by hand is a royal pain, so I recalled a simple little kludge that would get all the bad mail into one queue so it could be deleted in one fell swoop instead of having to right click on every queue and choose "Delete all messages (No NDR)"

The steps are laid out pretty explicitly in a KB article from Microsoft, so I won't go into great detail here. I'll just give you the overview.

All of the following steps are done using the Exchange System Manager. I did this using Exchange 2000, it should work for Exchange 2003. I haven't played with 2007 at all -- three servers?!? -- so I have no clue if this is still how it works.

First, you need to make sure all your good mail is out of the queue, so I tend to do this at 3 AM when I know that it's been a few hours since anyone has tried to send any out-of-office mail and anything I'm going to find in the queue is crap. YMMV.

Next, stop the SMTP Virtual Server for the site.

Create a new SMTP Connector which is going to take all of the junk mail. Make sure the "Address Space" properties are set that SMTP is accepting for * (all domains) at a cost of 1.

Restart the SMTP Virtual Server.

All of the mail should now go into this new queue you created. Right click the queue, choose "Delete all messages (No NDR)"

Refresh the queue list a few times to make sure all messages are gone.

Stop the SMTP Virtual Server.

Delete the SMTP Connector you just made.

Restart the SMTP Virtual Server.

Mail should start flowing as usual.