Beginners Query - Auto Reply Form

[Curious]

Hi,

I would like to write a addin for Outlook (2002) to auto reply to a
message with a customised form. We are not running Exchange Server but
have a direct connection to the internet.

We recieve queries via email that I would like to be able to reply to
with a questionnaire if possible. The addin would search the incoming
mail for specific text and then reply with the HTML questionnaire.

For instance, if we receive a mail such as

========================
Example Enquiry
========================

Title : Mr
First Name : John
Last Name : Doe
Age : 01/01/01
etc
etc

The addin should search for

=========================
Example Enquiry
=========================

so we know that we are replying to the correct mail and then send a
message such as

Dear Mr Doe,
^^^^^^^<- Cribbed from email

Thank you for you enquiry .... yadda yadda yadda please find following
.....

And then the standard questionnaire template.

My questions are :

1. Is it possible?
2. Is this best to do via macro or addin?
3. Where can I find some code to base this on or can someone here
provide me with code that I can tailor?

I do have basic VB experience so I think I could tailor a sample
script to fit my purposes if I could find a base to start with.

Many thanks in advance

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

1) Yes, this is possible. It's mostly basic text parsing and HTML tags, not
much that's Outlook specific except for kicking off the automatic
processing.

2) If this is needed for just you, VBA macros would probably be fine. If
it's an application that many people in your organization will run and that
you'll have to maintain the code for, a COM add-in would be the preferred
implementation.

3) The place to start is with the MAPIFolder.Items.ItemAdd event, which is
the "hook" most frequently used to kick off processing of incoming messages.
See http://www.outlookcode.com/d/zaphtml.htm and
http://www.outlookcode.com/d/quarexe.htm for some examples.