Running scripts on incoming mail?

[Kevin G.]

Hello all,

I have a situation, and I'm not sure the best way to go about it. I
would like to setup some Outlook autoresponders to kick out a message
to my customers when I get a new sales inquiry, letting them know that
a sales consultant will be contacting them shortly. Easy enough to do
if the mail were being delivered FROM the customer's email address, but
unfortunately this is NOT the case.

All our sales leads come delivered FROM a system-generated email
address, and the customer's email address is included within the body
of the email message. Unfortunately, there is not way to change the
contact form to manipulate the FROM address to be the actual customer's
email, so that's not an option.

So I'm wondering if Outlook 2003 is capable of running a script (or
something similar) on all incoming email, where it will parse out the
customer email from the body of the message, and send back a canned
autoresponder to that email address? Of course I don't want it to send
this autoresponder to all pieces of incoming mail, but only those
messages that are new sales leads.

I can go into more detail on how the messages are formatted, but I
thought I would throw this out there first and see if something like
this is even possible. Being from a Linux background and having used
Procmail for situations similar to this, I figured this would be
possible... but of course those situations were at the server level,
and not the client like I'm trying to do here.

Any response on this is greatly appreciated.

Kevin G.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

As with all Office programs, Outlook has a rich programming model that supports everything from simple VBA macros to add-ins that can be distributed throughout an enterprise. If you're new to Outlook VBA macros, these web pages should help you get started:

http://www.winnetmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=21522&pg=1
http://www.outlookcode.com/d/vb.htm