Thanks A Trivedi,
Possibly I didn't explain myself properly in the original post. It is my ISP Orange who suggested using Outlook as they accept the limitations with their own service. Outlook is now set up to send and receive email using my orange address. The Help file in Outlook says clearly that installing Office Service Pack 2 removes all restrictions on numbers in a distribution list, but at present that doesn't seem to be the case for me. Does your solution No. 1, using a mail merge, mean sending the emails as a mail merge containg a document or are you refering to simply using the list of contacts to merge the addreses etc?

Hope you can still help

Phil Smith