Automatic Reply When Your Inbox is Too Full

I was checking Replyz (for those not familiar with Replyz, it’s web app that finds questions on Twitter) last night looking for questions about Microsoft Outlook and stumbled across this one from a tweeter named Nibby Priest.

Outlook should have a feature when you inbox is over 100 items to send out messages that say "really busy try later". #FB

— Nibby Priest (@NibbyP) July 11, 2012

I’m not sure this is really a good idea, especially in a business setting, but it is possible. It would be nice if you could do this with a rule, but rules don’t have the ability to get a count of the messages already in your inbox. For that we need a script. There’s not much to the script. It’s triggered each time items are delivered to your inbox. The first thing it does is check to see if you’re inbox is over some predefined threshold. In keeping with Nibby Priest’s tweet I’ve set the threshold to 100 messages, but you can change it to any value you want. If your inbox is over the threshold, then the script creates and sends a message back to the sender telling them that you are too busy and to please try again later. You can configure the subject and body of the message to anything you want.

Harvesting All Email Addresses From an Outlook Mailbox

Let’s face it, I like answering questions. I’m active on both Experts-Exchange and Quora, and have started monitoring Twitter looking for questions I can answer. Earlier this year I discovered Replyz, a novel web service that scans Twitter for questions. Replyz is where I ran across this question from marthasmith.

Does anyone have a magical way to extract all email addresses out of my Outlook? Not just contacts–out of messages, everything.

Harvesting addresses is pretty simple. I showed how to do this for meetings in this earlier post. marthasmith wants to take it a step further and collect address for different Outlook items types (e.g. emails, addresses, contacts, etc.) and she wants to do this for all folders. The first requirement calls for detecting the item type being processed since different types of items have different properties. The second requirement can be satisfied through a recursive loop.