how to send mails with a .Net app, via Outlook - vb.net

I'm new in web development and would like to add a feature to a project I'm working on.
I'd like to send emails with this project, and also to have a kind of agenda.
I'm already using outlook for the mails and the agenda. The thing I'd like is to have a kind of template. I've got it difficult to explain what I'm looking for, as far as I'm not a native english speaker.
So, let's have an example :
I'd like to develop customer loyalty. So, I'd like to send mails to a few customers (maximum 10 mails sent per offer).
In the view, I'll have to make a research on a keyword, which will return a list of customers. I'd like to have, next to each client, a hyperlink called "mail", wich would open Outlook, with the mail that's allmost fullfilled (with the name of the guy I'm mailing).
Is it possible to do this like that?

While I am not 100% positive what and how you're trying to accomplish, and because Outlook is an email client app, I'll assume, that the website user is going to click the link and use Outlook. In that case the answer to your question is right under your nose :-) - examine the "Share a link to this question via email" on this very page - it uses a "mailto" tag.

Related

Outlook VBA - How to get email item from user input

Although Im quite experienced with Excel VBA, Im not so much in regards of Outlook VBA (started yesterday, literally), so Im uncertain on how to get this simple task accomplished:
I created some coding to get a specific e-mail from the Inbox and then parse it and forward - that part is all good and well. Currently the code autodetects and retrieve the e-mail item using a set of parameters to filter through the Inbox. However, now I need to expand this code so that it can work with any e-mail item, and not only with that specific e-mail.
My idea is to get the user to input which e-mail item he/she wants to parse and forward, instead of getting the code to look in a specific place. How can that be done? The user input methods that I use regularly are InputBox (which returns a string) and GetOpenFileName, none of them suitable to pointing to a mail item within Outlook.
I thought about making the code work with the currently open e-mail item, but often the users have several e-mail items opened at once - forcing them to leave only one open for the code to work is not viable. Also, the code will be ran by people who have little to no IT expertise, so requesting things such as paths is also not an option. Is there any method for this?
I figured that working with Active MailItem is the way to go, as #niton suggested as well. I used a coding very similar to the one in this post, although I had to develop the handlers in case the user has other types of Objects active at the moment (AppointmentItems, for instance) or have multiple items selected. Final solution wasn't that much elegant - I was wishing for some sort of system input box where the user could point to the mail or something, but this works.

Auto email response from Shopify api

I've successfully created a script that will import username/passwords etc into Shopify (using the api).
However, when I do this an automatic email is sent to the customer. I don't need this and can't find a way of either modifying it or turning it off. There is no mention of the email in the api documentation which has meant me finding out the hard way (by some clients complaining!)
The email is not the same one that is sent to the customer when a new account is set up. So where does it come from? How can I switch it off/modify it's contents?
Any ideas?
Well, after some digging I found where the email message was being generated from. It is one of the default messages that are already set up in Shopify (Customer Account confirmation) under 'Emails & Notifications'.
Just make sure you change this before you start running your shop as the default message is a little 'dry'.
Thanks for your help guys.

From email to shared hosted backend to remote frontend

So my friend hosts a little get together every once in a while where space is limited to the first 14 people who RSVP. He emails the invite out to a list and then accepts the first people who respond. Tonight I barely got in because I can't always check my email, so I told him that I would write a program that would respond instantly to his request. This would not normally be a problem (autoresponder, easy) except he has recently created an online signup form. I think it would be funny for him to send out his next invite and get a sub-100ms response from me, so I would like to give this a try.
The problem is, I'm not quite sure how to go about it without going to to much expense. I have a personal site that can host some .NET backend code, but it's on a shared GoDaddy server so I don't really have a ton of access to the mailserver or anything. I was thinking that if I could get an email sent to a certain address that maybe it could trigger a webrequest that could pull down his page and then fill the (very simple, like 2 or 3 inputs) form out and submit it, but again, I'm not quite sure how.
Would anyone have an idea about how I could go about this? I would want for this to happen automatically without any sort of interaction from me, just basically as soon as I get an email from a certain email address, somehow my code is triggered and the form filled out and submitted.
This is just for fun, but the programmer in me is curious as to how I could actually get this to work.
Thanks!
The most affordable thing I know of would be through NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. If you set up an account there, you can configure a domain with email forwarding for 3 cents/day. They have an option to forward the email to a script, so you could write something that would look at the mail, pull down the form, and post to a server.
I'm not sure but I think the script has to be running on their servers, so you'll have to set up a website (another few cents per day) and write the script to run in a UNIX environment (PHP or Perl or such). If you insist on .NET, you could write a minimal PHP script to forward the data to your GoDaddy account.

Programmatic Reaction to Receiving New Email

I'm interested in automating some reactive work I do when receiving certain emails in one of my email accounts. What I would like to have happen is:
On receipt of new email in the account
If the new email passes the "Need to React" criteria (based on body content and subject line)
3a. Scrape some content out of the email body and subject lines
3b. Populate a template form (e.g. Excel spreadsheet) with the scraped data
3c. Print the populated form and save the populated form in some folder (e.g. as a pdf)
What's the best (defined as easiest to implement by myself) approach / combination of technologies for achieving this automation?
i have not done exactly what you are asking, but I know Microsoft Outlook has a Rules engine that can take incoming messages, check for various content, and then do various actions including running applications and/or scripts.
You should look at Visual Studio Tools for Office if you are a c# person.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsto/default
You can write an Outlook add-on that can do pretty much everything you have outlined above.

Building Forms for Outlook 2007

I was just introduced to the concept of Outlook forms. I don't know if this will solve my problem but here is what I want to do:
I want to be able to have employees who are inside the company fill out some forms. So all I have to do is create the form and PUSH it to their Outlook? After they fill out the form, can I capture the data somehow? Has anyone does this before? Can someone recommend a good tutorial/examples?
Update: The Outlook->Access option seems like a great one, but it seems like the form must be emailed by someone. In other words, if someone wants to fill out any form they first have to be emailed a form. What if a person wants to just fill out a form? How would he do it if he has no access to the Access database?
Here are three options:
This page is a really good jump page for custom forms in Outlook. In fact, that whole site is pretty good with lots of examples and links like Outlook Forms Step-by-Step Tutorial.
However, if you also have Access 2007, I'd actually recommend something simpler and easier to create email forms that can be sent to users and collect back all of the information. Once I discovered this in Access 2007 I never went back to custom Outlook forms.
Basically, you create an Access db with the data you want to collect and then in the "External Data" tab in Access 2007, you click "Create E-mail" and a wizard will walk you through creating an email with the form in the body (which is either HTML or InfoPath, depending on which one you choose). You send this to your users (you can have a recipient list in a table as well in your Access DB) and they fill out the form (I used it for surveys) and then they click submit. It goes back to your Outlook in a special folder and as soon as you open Outlook, it will synch it with the database. Then you can slice and dice all of that database information.
Here are some great tutorials on this:
Demo: Collect data in Access 2007 by
using e-mail
How to integrate Microsoft Access
and Outlook 2007
Finally, if you just want to collect back much simpler information, like "Yes", "No", "Maybe", the easiest way is to create voting buttons. Go to New Message -> Options - Voting Buttons. You can customize this if needed by separating your choices with a semi-colon ;.
In #2 and #3 above, these are scenarios to initiate data collection.
There are other situations where someone doesn't need a prompt via email to fill something out right there, but rather just submit a form (like an expense report, or a gas mileage report). #1 above (Outlook custom forms) is generally better choice in that scenario, but:
Outlook forms have typically been
harder to deploy and teach people to
use (there are things like "public
forms", "private forms", etc.)
Outlook forms have been, in practice,
been replaced by other technologies.
In particular, InfoPath/Forms Server and
Sharepoint Forms. This is because neither
of those two technologies requires
users to do a whole lot other than
follow a link to fill out a form. I used to know, about 10 years ago, many companies who tried to use Outlook forms and most of them gave up development of them in favor of other technologies.
This isn't to say that Outlook forms are bad in any way. If you don't have other technologies available to serve as a Forms Server, then this could be a decent option to consider.
To look at other semi-lightweight ways of form submission, you can use MS Word templates as the front end and have them update an Access DB. Here are a couple of good articles on this:
Import Data Directly from Word
Forms to Access Tables
How do I... Transfer data from a
Word form to an Access database?