As previously noted, Access 2000's TOP clause is the cognate of MySQL's LIMIT clause. Now let's say, having selected and contacted the first 1000 contacts from a big table, you want to isolate the next block of 1000 contacts.
The way not to accomplish this, is construct a query like
SELECT email FROM contacts
WHERE email NOT IN (
SELECT TOP 1000 email FROM contacts
)
WHERE email NOT IN (
SELECT TOP 1000 email FROM contacts
)
The NOT IN clause is just horribly inefficient and slow. If you're picking the TOP 1000 records, and your list is a million records, the database engine has to exhaustively string-compare all 1M records at least 1000 times, i.e. a minimum of a billion string comparisons. The efficient way to structure the query is to specify a JOIN:
SELECT TOP 1000 contacts.email, first_chunk.email
FROM contacts
LEFT JOIN first_chunk ON contacts.email = first_chunk.email
WHERE ((first_chunk.email) Is Null)
FROM contacts
LEFT JOIN first_chunk ON contacts.email = first_chunk.email
WHERE ((first_chunk.email) Is Null)