"the many" instead of "many"

Question

We should like to thank the many people who have written to us offering their support.

The sentence I quoted above is an example from Longman dictionary. I was wondering can we remove the article "the" and still have a grammatically acceptable sentence (the sentence below)?

We should like to thank many people who have written to us offering their support.

Answer 1

The many people is the entire group of people who have written. Thanking many people who have written to us could mean (and probably would mean) that we want to thank some of them but not all of them.