Mass Emailing To Our Students

Hello gang!

I've read through many of the threads relating to sending Email from Access but can't seem to find quite what I'm looking for. I work as a Tutor Coordinator at a local college and I've set up Access to handle a lot of the day-to-day chores that our administrative assistant has to deal with.

One feature that would be absolutely wonderful would be to create and send Emails to students at the click of a button. I have several types of Email I'd like to be able to set up, but the one most needed (and probably most complex) is this:

Students come in to the office and request a tutor. If we have a tutor available, we assign them to an available tutor. If there is no tutor availabe, then every Friday we send out an Email to each individual student saying something like this:

"Dear John Doe - We currently do not have a tutor for MATH 101 at this time, but when one becomes available we will let you know... blah, blah, blah..."

I'd like to set it up so that the body of the message comes from a template - such as a text file (that is easily edited by a user) and populated with fields from a query.

Probably do something like this:

Query the Student_First_Name_field, Student_Last_Name_field, Department_Name_field, Course_Number_field, and Student_Email_field. Send an Email to each Email address pulled from the Student_Email_field and tell them the following - "Dear <first name, last name> we currently do not have a tutor for <department name, course number> at this time... blah, blah, blah..."

Currently the way the administrative assistant handles this is to send each student an Email individually - manually creating each Email with the specific data needed. As you can guess, this is quite time-consuming.

I'm rather new to Access but have been a RDMS programmer (in PICK) for several years. I know what it is I want to do, but don't know how to do it in Access.

Any help?

Would the best way be to use text files for templates?

Can text files be set up with field codes (Access recognizes "<LAST NAME>" to be Student_Master_Table.Last_Name_field)?

I'm guessing this will likely have to be a Visual Basic loop that works with data from a query.

Help? *grin*