Lotus Notes / highlight specific sender in the common mailbox - formatting

I use Lotus Notes 8.5.3 and I have one common mailbox which is used by many people. When we send emails we always CC our mailbox and what we see in the "Who" field is the mailbox name. But in the details of each email I can find that it was sent for example by me.
Now the question is - can I somehow highlight emails in the common mailbox sent by myself?
Simple File/Preferences/Mail/Sender Colors I think does't help...

You can easily highlight a sender on Lotus Notes. Here is how.
First, copy the name in Notes format of the person you want to highlight - Example: joe smoke/costa mesa/XYZ or whatever your company uses.
Go to the Notes icon (next to the Apple logo if you use a Mac).
Select Preferences.
Click on Mail (It is a small pull down with a little arrow).
Now, select Access Delegation.
Now, select MAIL(it is the first tab on the left....and a little hard to see as it is on small letters.
Then select SENDER COLORS. It is located words the right and it is a little hard to see.
Now, paste the name of the sender you want to highlight and select the color on the right and side. You can also write but make sure to write it without mistakes and on the correct Notes format.
Press OK at the bottom of the screen to save.
Now, re-start Notes for the changes to take effect.
After re-starting Notes, you will see the name of the sender highlighted in the color you picked. If it does not show highlighted, you probably made a mistake writing the name of the person. Just do it again.
Best of luck and have a Super Fantastic day!
NOTE: This process works for most versions on Notes. When writing this, I was using Notes version 10.0.1.

You will need to modify the folder ($Inbox) in Domino Designer.
Insert a new hidden column at the beginning and enable "Use value as color" property.
Then enter a formula for the column:
red := 255:0:0;
blue := 0:0:255;
#If(
#Contains ( From ; "Quora Digest" ) ;
blue;
#Contains ( From ; "Mario Rossi" );
red;
""
)

You could even manage the changes w/o installing software like Designer Client - but that won't help because the suggested solution (by DonAndreas) modifying the Inbox Folder does exactly the same thing like File/Preferences/Mail/Sender Colors (in a much more worse way).
Any modification in design or preferences like this will result in a visible change to all users who are working in this mailbox! All users would see YOUR mails in another color but never their own mails like this.
What you really need is a change where "me" means not only you rather each users name by itself. So Jon Doe should see mails from Jon Doe in another color while Jane Doe sees her own mails in another color but Jon's mails in standard color.
The next problem is the difference beetween sender (from) and sent by (principal) - any previous discussed change would only affect 'from' but never 'principal' - which you need to accomplish your needs.
What could help is a feature called "private on first use" which creates automatically a slightly different (i.e. uses "me" in a dynamic way like #UserName) view for each user. BUT: the Inbox must not exist in multiple copies because the router would only deliver mails to the first one it sees and all others will stay empty. Moving mails between (each users) Inbox and other folders would only affect the users copy of the original Inbox - not visible in the other Inboxes ;) You don't want that 'solution'.
So there is no simple solution as long as we speak about the original Inbox or folders in general.

Related

How can I show custom MailItem properties in the email header in Outlook 2007?

I work in a manufacturing environment. I am setting up some custom fields in my Outlook inbox that will allow me to quickly categorize emails by what material code(s) and lot number(s) the email is about. In my inbox, I have two new columns, "Material" and "Lot No". I wrote a macro that allows me to pull up a UserForm to quickly edit these values through the UserProperty prop on each email.
Image of columns in Inbox to demo what I mean.
I know that I can open each email individually, go to "Design This Form" and manually add the fields into the header, but this is obviously not practical (I'm doing this whole exercise to improve my efficiency, after all). Is there a way to programmatically do this?
Image of manually-added fields in email header.
I am searching all over and striking out. I'm not even able to find a good reference for how to manipulate the form elements of a received email (or at least a reference that I understand).
Thanks.
Use MailItem.UseProperties.Add / MailItem.Save to add/modify user properties.

auto-move email back to Inbox on flagged due date

I am wondering how I can make it so when flagged e-mails are due they move from some folder to the Inbox.
Essentially, I have written some VBA that makes Outlook work like Inbox by Google. The VBA:
lets me "snooze" e-mails in the Inbox for a number of days I pick and hide it (using view filters)
if a new e-mail comes in matching a "snoozed" e-mail then it categories the message with a message so when I open the e-mail I'll know there are e-mails in the same conversation that are hidden
when the a "snoozed" email's timer is up it automatically shows back up in the Inbox
Right now my code "hides" the e-mail by using View filters:
"http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x10900003" = 1 OR
"http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x10900003" = 0 OR
"http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062003-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/81050040" <= 'Today' OR
"urn:schemas:httpmail:messageflag" IS NULL
However, I was thinking, instead of hiding it I should move "snoozed" e-mails to another folder.
The part I'm stuck with is moving the e-mails back to the Inbox after their timer is up.
I guess I need some way to hook into something that triggers when a flagged e-mails due date has approached?
The reason I want to do this is because if someone sends me an email that they have flagged then because my view filter hides all flagged messages the e-mail will come in as hidden and I won't see it until its due.
One option is to trap the Application.Reminder event, which supplies the Item object which triggered the event. However this requires that flags also have a reminder set on them. The only other alternatives is to scan the Mailbox on a timer or Outlook start - or the ToDo List - and calculate the due dates for every flagged item.
You can do this client-side using a view filter. This is outlined really well on this website, but I'll post a summary here for completeness.
Create a new snooze view
Click on View tab.
Click Change View.
Select Save Current View As a New View... from the menu.
Give a name to the new view like Snooze Email or To-do list View.
Select All Mail and Post Folders option from the radio button.
Click OK.
This new view is not compulsory to create but this creation will give you the option to go back to your original view smoothly whenever you like to do so.
Apply filters
Click on View Settings under the View tab.
Click on Filter... button.
Click on Advanced tab.
To define a criterion, select the Field > Frequently-used fields > Due Date.
Select does not exist Condition from the drop-down list.
Press Add to List.
To add another criterion, select the Field > Frequently-used fields > Due Date.
Select On or before Condition from the drop-down list.
In Value field, type Today.
Press Add to List.
To add the third criterion, select the Field > Frequently-used fields > Flag Status.
Select not equal to Condition from the drop-down list.
In Value field, select Completed.
Press Add to List.
Click OK.
As soon as you press OK, all the email with due dates provided or completed flag will disappear from your inbox. Mail with due dates will reappear on your inbox on the due date.
Apply Flags
Right-click on the flag (symbol) against the top-most email in your inbox.
Select an appropriate option (when do you want to reappear the email in the inbox?)
Just to remind you that setting an item to This Week will set the reappear/due date to the upcoming Friday and Next Week will set it to the following Monday. You can choose Custom... to set any specific date you want to have it reappear as well, even telling Outlook to throw a reminder if you like.
This is an important step. The first time it may seem tedious, but there is an alternative to do that by using the move to folder tool for the emails which do not require your actions.
How to snooze the whole email conversation?
Because most of the readers are asking this question, I thought I should include it in the article.
If you are using the conversation view in the outlook, follow few more steps.
Open the conversation by clicking on the triangle on the left.
Select the subject line of the email conversation.
Apply flag to the subject line (whole email conversation).
Start Snoozing Email
Once you have applied filter, all you need to do is when you receive any new email, you just need to provide a flag to it. It will reappear at your convenient date, until that day it will be out of sight, out of mind. So you do not need to worry about the emails which are not important to you. Rather deleting it, you can mark them with Completed Flag Status and it will be disappeared forever. (Tip: You can use Quick Step Done to do it with one click.)
If you ever wish to see all the emails again, go back to View tab and change to your original view.

Using the Addressbook in Outlook VBA

Someone at work asked me if I could implement an easy system for him to send out Outlook template-mails based on a few parameters he could enter.
An example would be a message like this:
"Hello,
Please be informed that system **Parameter1** is current down.
Regards,"
I was thinking about making a Form in Outlook VBA that would dynamically look for the amount of times a string styled like a parameter (e.g. ##parameters##) was found in a certain template and subsequently create a editbox in the form for each found parameter.
The problem is that I obviously would like to add an box for the recipients. I would need to find a way to make the call the Outlook Addressbook and make it behave like one. This was less intuitive than I had hoped. So far I have only managed to do the following:
Dim snd As Outlook.SelectNamesDialog
Dim displayLL As Boolean
Set snd = Application.Session.GetSelectNamesDialog()
snd.NumberOfRecipientSelectors = Outlook.OlRecipientSelectors.olShowTo
snd.AllowMultipleSelection = True
displayLL = snd.display()
As you can see, this only pops up the addressbook and allows me to select an few addresses. But I'm stumped on how I can actually make some fields that will actually act like the "To:" and "CC:" fields in a regular Outlook mail.
Not sure how relevant this is, considering I eventually took quite a different route, but I thought I'd still add this since no-one answered.
I simply created a form that would list all templates by searching through the templates folder in the %AppData%. I would then loop through the entire mail looking for parameter-styled strings and ask for the desired value each time I would encounter such a string (through a simply inputbox). Instead of adding a custom "recipients" box, I simply opened a new mail with the parameters filled out correctly.
The user could then simply add recipients to the mail like he usually would, and he was fine with this. That way, he was also able to double-check if the mail indeed looked exactly like he wanted to.
Nothing fancy or something that a 7-year old wouldn't be able to do, but it works.

Outlook: How to refresh folder after setting "Categories" on mails

I wrote some code to parse the subjects of mails in a certain folder. The parsed stuff gets written to the Categories-field of the mail-object. According to debugging this works nicely.
The problem now is that I do not see the effect in Outlook. Actually I only see it in five out of ~30 mails. On those five the Categories-column and the output in the mail panel present the correct value. All other mails show nothing in those two areas.
Clicking on each mail, going to another folder and then back, double-clicking a mail don't do anything.
What do I need to do to update the folder to see the categories on all mails?
EDIT:
I wrote some more code that only picks the currently selected mails. This code only works if one mail is selected even though the loop touches all mails. If I select more than one mail only the first selected mail may (yes, may) have changed.
While looking for something else I ran into another Outlook-question and had an enlightening moment. The code sample there includes the line
Item.Save
which I had not in my code. I added the line after all manipulations on the mail-item and now it works flawlessly. It even works with many mails selected.
Some solutions are quite simple...

Change contents of "assign to"

I activated restrict_owner to change the textfield to a dropdown when creating a new ticket. Is there a way to change the contents of that dropdown from user id's to user names?
The reason is, that all user id's that we use to log in are somewhat cryptic (something like xyz01, xyz02 and so on). If that list could show the associated user names, that you can enter in the prefs, that would be perfect.
Regards,
Sascha
To get around that, I installed the Auto-Complete Users Plugin. This will allow you to more easily select a user by account name, real name, or email address, plus it seems to have better performance than using restrict_owner.
I'm not sure if the plugin covers all of the same form fields as the restrict_owner option. If there's one that it misses, it shouldn't be too difficult to modify the code and add another field.