Delay sending of mail merge items?

[cmerch19602003]

This is a problem all over the web forums and the only supposed answer to this is in a VBA code book I don't really want to buy for one simple (yeah, right!) problem. I have found that hundreds of people love the mail merge feature in Word (I have office 2003 full blown) but they all seem to want the same feature I do that MS conveniently neglected to program in (go figure).

There is no built in way to throttle the sends of a large database. No way to delay or schedule the deliveries. I have tried writing rules based on properties in the word doc. but they don't work at all.

I did find the member DeferredDeliveryTime in the MailItem class of Outlook library, but virtualy all the VBA I have done to date has been in Excel and I have never dealt with passing commands or calling to other apps, so I don't know what to do with it.

Is there any way to cause Outlook to delay and/or schedule the sends of a Word mail merge by using VBA code?

I found a plug-in that looks like it will work but its packed with stuff that's already in the mail merge in Word and frankly, except for the delayed delivery problem Word is just hands down better.

Anybody? By the way be easy on me with the buzz words it's one thing about programming I never picked up on.

P.S. I put the rating on this post. I was trying to bring my bad mood up...
it helped a little...