Automated Reminder Email

 

A gent named Joni Räsänen contacted me on Twitter with a question/request. Here’s Joni’s tweet.

@TechnicLee Would be possibe to build script to automatically send meeting memo template by email before appointment starts?

— Joni Räsänen (@rasanenj) December 15, 2013

The solution to Joni’s request is to use Outlook’s built-in appointment reminders to trigger sending the email. To do this, we’ll trap the event that fires each time a reminder goes off. The code will check to see if the item that triggered the reminder is an appointment and if it’s a member of a certain category. Checking the category will allow Joni to set reminders on any appointment, including those he doesn’t want an email sent for. If the appointment is a member of the designated category, then the code will create and send a predefined message. If the appointment is not a member of the designated category, then the code will exit without doing anything.

Adding a List of Attachments to Emails as They’re Sent

This morning I ran across the following tweet from hillarief.

Can Outlook automatically, when you attach a file, insert a note into your email msg that says something like "Attached: {filename}"?

— hillarie (@ThisIsHillarie) September 12, 2013

As I explained to Hillarie when I replied, there’s no simple way to do this as an item is attached, but it’s pretty easy to do it as the message is sent. Of course this requires a macro. All the macro does is check each outbound message for attachments. If it finds any, then it builds a list of attachment names and appends it to the beginning of the message. The macro ignores hidden attachments (e.g. embedded images). This solution should work for Outlook 2007 and later. Hillarie is using Outlook 2010, so this should satisfy her requirement.

Send Messages with Zip File Attachments to Junk Mail

One of the things I do each morning is check Twitter for questions about Outlook. This morning I found this one from Meester Neek.

Is there any way to set up #Outlook so it automatically puts emails with zip file attachments into junk mail?

— NKBTN (Parody of Humanity) (@NKBTN) June 18, 2013

Someone else had already replied to the tweet suggesting that Meester Neek create a rule to handle this. Unfortunately, Outlook’s only rule condition for attachments is which has an attachment. There is no option for specifying an attachment name or type. We can still use a rule and that rule can use the which has an attachment condition, but the rule is going to have to run a script in order to determine if any of the attachments are zip files and act accordingly. The script itself is extremely simple. All it has to do is check the file name of each attachment to see if it ends with .zip. If it does, then the script will move the message to the Junk E-mail folder. Otherwise, the script does nothing. This solution should work for any version of Outlook on a PC. Note that it will not work for Outlook on a Mac, OWA, or mobile devices.