Forward Messages at Certain Times of the Day

 

Today, while checking questions on Experts-Exchange, I stumbled across one where the author is looking for a way to forward messages during certain times of the day. S/he had found a potential solution on another blog, but was unable to get it to work. I had a look at that solution, and while it’s both clever and functional, I think there’s a simpler way to go about this and that’s to use a macro.

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Extracting Hail Report Data from Outlook Messages

A reader named Mohammed Syed asked if I could put together a script to parse information from messages he receives containing hail reports, and write it to a spreadsheet. Each message body contains one or more reports that look like this

1.00″ reported @ 04/10/2013 15:10 CST
IL, BRIGHTON – Zip Code: 62012 Zip Pop: 6261 Zip Homes: 2517
County: MACOUPIN
Remarks: DELAYED REPORT. NEAR THE INTERSECTION OF MACCOUPIN… JERSEY… AND MADISON COUNTIES.

For each report, Mohammed wants to extract the date/time of the report, the number of inches, and the zip code the report came from. Next, he needs the solution to create a report ID consisting of the alert date/time, the number of inches, and the zip code. The ID will be a concatenation of the elements with each element separated by an underscore. Mohammed wants the data written to an existing spreadsheet with a new row for each report. Finally, he wants to be able to do this from an Outlook rule he already has.

Here’s my solution. Hopefully this is just what Mohammed is looking for.

Mobile Email Notifications

 

Today, most of us have smartphones that can send/receive email from anywhere. But what if you don’t have a smartphone? Or perhaps you do have a smartphone, but your company has a policy that prohibits accessing the corporate email system from it. Let’s say that you have a cell phone, not a smartphone, or you have a personally owned smartphone, and that you will be away from your desk for a while. While you’re out, you’d like to know if a particular message has arrived. That’s the situation one commenter found himself in and approached me about.

Outlook does have a built-in solution for this scenario, which is to use a rule that sends a message based on a condition. The rule watches for messages that meet a certain condition. When one arrives, it would create an email and send it to the email account on your smartphone, if that’s what you have, or as a text message to a regular cell phone. The problem with this solution is that you have to use a message template and templates don’t allow you to pass on any of the message’s details. Assume that you want a notification for any message coming from a person on your project team. A message from one of them comes in and the rule sends the notification. Because the notification is a template, you don’t have any clue who sent the message that triggered the rule, or what the subject is. All you know is that you got a message from someone on your project team. That’s not very useful.