automate email sending via outlook

[BlackMustard]

i have coded a little windows application in vb.net, which looks up a lot of info from an excel sheet, defines and fills new outlook.mailitem:s with information and attempts to send them. but for each mail that is to be sent, i get a message from outlook saying "A program is trying to send emails on your behalf. Do you want to allow this? If this is unexpected it might be a virus and you should choose No." I have to wait a couple of seconds and then click "Yes" for each popup - which might be hundreds depending on the excel sheet.

Is there any way to get around this? I need it to be something that's pretty simple for the user of my application to do, like an easy-accessible setting in Outlook, or (even better) some code that allows me to do this. The main concern is to be able to automatically send batches of emails.

Any suggestions or workarounds?

PS. I know this sounds like I'm trying to spam half the world, but the program is for sending out monthly reports to my company's customers. They pay to receive these mails ;)

[BlackMustard]

hi again,

i found this thread: http://www.thescripts.com/forum/thread764272.html

in there there's source code for a "killer" class, which starts a separate thread to kill dialog boxes. it works excellent for the dialog that asks for permission to access outlook functions, but i can't get it to kill the little dialog for the actual sending operation - i assume this is because the dialog box has a five second delay before you can actually press the buttons...

does anyone know a way around this?

[BlakeMcKenna]

BlackMustard,

I have this exact same issue and scenario. I too read an input file filled with email and customer information. My problem is that I can't seem to assign the "SenderEmailAddress" property with a value (an email address contained in the file) as it is a "Read Only" property. Did you ever get this resolved.

Thanks,

Blake

[BlackMustard]

Hi Blake,

No, I actually never got this issue resolved as in working exactly the way I wanted it. Instead I ended up writing a little .Net executable that called some Outlook API:s to just open the emails for viewing, and then my colleague had to click "send" individually for each email. This took a while - some half hour at most, but compared to the full day it could take to manually generate the emails, add attachments etc, this saved a lot of time. And besides, she wanted to review every email before sending it anyway =). Unfortunately I left my position at that company six months ago, so I don't have any of the source code available and I cannot remember exactly how it worked.

As far as changing the SenderEmailAddress, however, I don't think it can be done. I can think of only one possibility (if it is possible at all) to do so, namely when the email object is created. Look in the documentation for a constructor method of the Outlook.MailItem class that takes the senders address as a parameter (press F2 to open the Object Viewer in the VBA Editor).

An alternative that I remember I used, and that works fine, is to change the SendOnBehalfOfName (or whatever the property was called - again, check with the documentation). This will make the email sender field hold something like "Blake McKenna on behalf of YourCompany Customer Services", and it will be sorted under "YourCompany Customer Services" in the folder views in Outlook. Just make sure that the user who's logged in has authority to send emails on behalf of that account (those settings are changed within the account you want to send on behalf of).

I hope this helps - as I said, I have left the company and all the scripts behind me, so I have only my memory to rely on.

Regards,

Tomas