Mail merge in Outlook,
without Word or Excel

Connect your Microsoft mailbox, open the composer, and pick who it’s for: individual contacts, or an Email List built from a contact search. Write the message once and drop in merge fields like {{first_name}} or {{company}}. The panel beside the editor shows what each field will say for the person you’re previewing. Each recipient gets a separate email from your Outlook address, saved to Sent Items, so no one sees the rest of the list. The list lives in ContactsPlus as a saved search, so there’s no Word document to rebuild and no Excel file to refresh before the next send.

Yes. Word’s email merge hands its messages to the Outlook app on your computer, and the new Outlook for Windows only partly supports that, which is why merged messages can sit in the Outbox and never send. ContactsPlus doesn’t use the Outlook app. Once an email is queued, it sends from your Microsoft mailbox on schedule. Which Outlook you have open doesn’t matter, and neither does whether your computer is on. The sent messages then appear the same way in classic Outlook, new Outlook and Outlook on the web.

Microsoft 365 business and school mailboxes, Exchange Online, and personal Outlook.com addresses. You sign in and approve the connection on Microsoft’s own page. Some organisations block third-party apps until an administrator consents, so on a work account you may need to ask IT before it connects. You can add several mailboxes, Gmail and Google Workspace included, and choose the sender for each email from the composer’s From line. iCloud Mail is the one exception. Apple offers no way for other apps to send from it.

The limit depends on the account: 10,000 recipients a day and 30 messages a minute on a Microsoft 365 work mailbox, up to 5,000 a day on Outlook.com for Microsoft 365 subscribers, and less on other and newer accounts. Go over and Microsoft blocks the mailbox. It stays blocked until the past 24 hours drop back under the limit. ContactsPlus sends 30 emails an hour and 250 a day by default. Both are adjustable, and a new mailbox warms up at 6 an hour. One send to an Email List holds up to 1,000 people.

Yes. The composer’s When it sends field shows the next free slot, and the scheduler sets a later date and time. A list starts then and goes out at your hourly and daily pace, so a long one can take more than a day. While it runs, the queue lists every waiting email with its own time: move one to the front, open it to edit, cancel it or send it straight away, or press Hold to pause everything from that mailbox.

Yes. Use Attach a file or drop one anywhere on the message, and the same attachment goes with every copy, which Word’s email merge can’t do; that gap is why many Outlook users end up buying an add-in. Merge fields work in the subject line too, so ‘The proposal for {{company}}’ arrives as ‘The proposal for Larkspur Interiors’. Preview shows each finished message, attachment included, before anything is queued.

Emailing is part of Premium and Teams. A free account can send up to 20 emails in total, so you can connect Outlook and run a real test before paying. Sending a test to yourself doesn’t use that allowance. Microsoft’s own daily limits still apply to your mailbox on every plan. The pricing page compares the plans.