Using Contact Category to Assign Category to Incoming Mail

[Stephen]

I am using Outlook 2007 and I would like to use the category that my contacts
are assigned to as a basis for mail message received from those categories.
For example I have Family as a category, when I receive a message from
someone in this category I want to assign the Family category to that
message. I have looked for a rule or any setting that would allow me to do
it and I can't find one.

 

[Judy Gleeson \(MVP Outlook\)]

yes that's a strange limitation of Rules. Here are some workarounds:

If there are few people in each Category, you could make a Rule that says if
it is from Fred; sally; judy; peter (add each name individually) then
Categorise the incoming email as "Friend" for example.

Or you could put each Category of Contact in a separate folder then use
Rules to say if the Sender is a Contact is the "Soccer Team" folder, put
the incoming email in the Soccer Team Category.

I hope this helps you at least a little bit!

Judy Gleeson
MVP Outlook
Outlook trainer and author of Productiv_IT with Outlook

read my articles here: www.judygleeson.com
www.acorntraining.com.au
Canberra, Australia

Joseph Joubert
To teach is to learn twice.

 

[Stephen]

I was trying to avoid the first suggestion since that is what we did in
Outlook 2003 and the Folders suggestion would work in some instances but one
of the big "features" of the Categories was being able to have more then one
per item so certain contacts that might be in both Work and Friends would
have to be in both folders if you wanted to categorize messages by both.
Thanks for the help but I do hope the Outlook team eventually adds this
functionality.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

I'm glad you asked that question. I thought it was interesting, too, so I included it as a code example (Listing 11.18) in my new book, Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming, which should be released next week. Since you asked, I've also posted the sample code at http://www.outlookcode.com/codedetail.aspx?id=1610.

See http://outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=49 if you need basics on getting started with Outlook VBA.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers