The occasional scrivener

Saving copies of messages in Outlook

At work I use MS Outlook, partly out of laziness, partly because it’s an application that I work to support. I use it for mail to me personally, and I also have access to a shared mailbox for support issues. As we are more than one person that handle these issues, we want to have a copy of all correspondence in the same place; this means that we want our replies to be copied to the shared support mailbox.

Now, under a normal mailing system such as IMAP, this is not a problem. Shared resources are separate accounts, and a competent mailreader can have different settings for signatures, local copies etc. Outlook, of course, does this differently.

You can have rules that are run when a message is received or sent. But from what I can see, you can’t specify these rules for a different mailbox. This means that if I specify that all my replies are saved to the support box, copies of my personal mail will be sent there, too. This is tedious and probably in breach of Sarbanes-Oxley, as well as brain-dead in general.

What I’ve had to do is to make a signature file containing a specified string, and let that string match act as a trigger for the rule saving the message. Of course, Outlook being what it is, you can’t specify different signature per mailbox either — oh no, that would make easy things possible! Instead I have to include the signature manually Each time I write a mail that I want to be copied.

This is one of those posts where I wish I had comments. But if you have any suggestions, and the time to write to me, I’d appreciate it. I will summarize any such suggestions here, with credit as appropriate. Email can be sent to gerikson@gmail.com. Thanks in advance!

Posted at 22:12, in the comm category. Comments [0]
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