To automate MS Outlook, you usually use macros (written in Visual Basic for Applications aka VBA). But often, company security policies denies access to Outlook Macros. But you can still use VB Script aka VBS.

Here I show two scripts that copy parts of an Outlook email to the Windows clipboard. A third script forwards all selected mails to an email address. I am not an VBS expert but have put them together from various other scripts and solutions around the web.

I use these scripts with Windows XP and Outlook 2003.

Copy mail content to clipboard

I use Emacs org-mode as an TODO-List and journaling application. When I want to reference an email in a task or journal entry I can either quote the email or link to it. The easiest way is to get the appropiate content into the clipboard and yank it in the org-mode buffer.

As far as I know, the Windows clipboard is directly available to VBA scripts. But not so for VB scripts. According to the net, there are several workarounds. The one I use here makes use of the Internet Explorer Object: it opens the „about:blank“ page and gets access to the clipboard through its „parentwindow“ property. To avoid a security question I added „about:blank“ to the list of local sites in the Internet Explorer security settings.

In org-mode you can have links and using org-outlook you can have links to specifc outlook message. You need the GUID of the specific message. One caveat here: that GUID changes when you move that message to a different folder.

Mass forward emails

The Outlook API provides an method to forward a mail. It behaves just like you would hit „forward“ in the GUI. Fill the recipient with a mail address and call the mail’s „send“ method. But wait: there will be a security questions that will ask you to confirm that you really want to send this mail. You have to wait 5 seconds to confirm it. This slows down mass forwarding… The following script loops through all selected mails in Outlook and forwards them.

I have seen one trick that claims to await the 5-second-confirmation-dialog: it uses some other VB object to simulate a „Alt-S“ keystroke so that it seems the user himself press „Send“ in the GUI. Don’t know if that works.

Assign keyboard shortcuts

I created shortcuts on the desktop to these scripts. For the first two scripts I assigned keyboard shortcut (C-F7 and C-S-F7 resp.) That way I do not need to navigate to the script to execute it.

When I look at the log files our server application creates (esp. the middleware tier) there is much information in it. But how much of it is helpful for administrators, our colleagues in „IT Operations“ department who are in charge of keep these applications running?

When you think about it, it all comes down to resources. Administrators can help when

• the application rans out of memory
• the filesystem is full
• the partner application (e.g. „web service“) is down
• we get errors because a SSL certificate of a server we talk to isout of date
• the database cannot be reached because the configured user password is wrong
• the configured URI of some partner application is wrong
• communication with a partner systems is interrupted because of a misconfigured firewall
• network connections are stale because of some network problems
• application cannot sent mails because of a misconfigured mail server

etc. In general, administrators can help when there is something wrong with resources our application needs or when the configuration for using these resources is wrong. These are errors I call „transient“ because when the problem with resource or configuration is fixed the problem „disappears“.

On the other hand, administrators cannot help when

• there is a integrity constraint violation when writing to the database
• there is a NullPointerException because programmers forget to check that a mandatory input field actually contains data
• there are errors because of unexpected input format
• there are validation errors while talking to a partner application
• some algorithm crashes with a „division by zero“ error

etc. Administrators cannot fix these things because only programmers can do by changing the code. These kind of errors I call „permanent“ errors because they cannot go away at runtime.

Of course, there is some kind of „gray area“ where administrator may check things but not necessarily are able to help, for instance

• today a partner application responded with a „NullPointerException“ – admins could check if everything else is OK with this application
• file handles or concurrent database sessions run out – admin could increase the number of file handles or concurrent database sessions until programmers fixes the root cause
• resolving a dead lock in the database.

In an ideal world, the applications log file entries clearly indicate whether an error is transient or permanent. But in reality it is not achieved easily. For instance, deciding whether a SQLException is rooted in a transient or permanent error means creating a list of SQL error codes for the database vendor your application uses. Take a look at the spring framework – they did exactly this. It is much easier to just log the SQLException and abort the transaction.

In summary, when notified about transient errors, administrators can help to keep the server application running, but with permanent errors only developers can help. When the log file entries identify which kind of error they refer to it helps administrator to do their job.