Whilst trying to come up with ways to make life easier at work I noticed that automating an email to appear with a subject, addressee and body pre-populated could save a lot of time in some circumstances – genius.
Trying to find a good way to do this wasn’t quite so easy however. Piecing together code from various forums and webpages I’ve come up with the below multi-purpose sub which can be called from anywhere within the program.
Note:
As this is a sub that I use regularly I will likely update this page with refinements as I make them. If you’ve any refinements on anything that I’ve posted feel free to get in touch and let me know.
Code
First put the following statement at the top of your module (you don’t have to do this in a module that’s just force of habit for me):
Imports Microsoft.Office.Interop
and add the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook reference (project>add reference) and declare the below two variables:
Public moApp As Outlook.Application Public mbKillMe As Boolean = True
These first two subs deal with checking whether outlook is open and whether to close it when the application closes. Reference the first when your application opens and reference the second when your application closes:
Public Sub SetOutlookInfo Try moApp = CType(GetObject(, "Outlook.Application"), Outlook.Application) mbKillMe = False Catch ex As Exception Try If moApp Is Nothing Then moApp = New Outlook.Application mbKillMe = True End If Catch ex As Exception MessageBox.Show("Outlook is not installed or available.", "Limited Functionality", MessageBoxButtons.OK) End Try End Try End Sub Public Sub CloseOutlook If mbKillMe = True Then If Not moApp Is Nothing Then moApp.Quit() moApp = Nothing End If End If End Sub
The sub that is called when you want to send an email allows you to customise each email individually with by passing in strings for the addressee, subject and body with an option to enter a string to CC.
Public Sub SendMail(ByVal _Addressee As String, ByVal _Subject As String, ByVal _Body As String, Optional ByVal _CC As String = "") Dim oEmail As Outlook.MailItem Form1.Cursor = Cursors.WaitCursor Try oEmail = DirectCast(moApp.CreateItem(Outlook.OlItemType.olMailItem), Outlook.MailItem) With oEmail .To = _Addressee '.CC = "ruff@example.com" If _CC <> "" Then .CC = _CC .Subject = _Subject .BodyFormat = Outlook.OlBodyFormat.olFormatHTML If _Body <> "" Then .Body = _Body .Importance = Outlook.OlImportance.olImportanceNormal '.ReadReceiptRequested = True '.Attachments.Add("C:\Cat.bmp", Outlook.OlAttachmentType.olByValue) 'Resolving recipients (below) triggers a security warning 'that users need to click through '.Recipients.ResolveAll() '.Save() .Display() 'Show the email message and allow for editing before sending '.Send() 'You can automatically send the email without displaying it. End With Catch ex As Exception MsgBox(ex.Message) End Try Form1.Cursor = Cursors.Default End Sub
Feel free to play around with the options that I’ve commented out (the code above was copied and pasted out of a project that I’m playing with at the moment) and if you’ve any improvements just let me know and I’ll post it – and likely use it in my projects as well.
