You are here: Home » Outlook » Using Outlook's ItemSend Event to BCC Emails

Using Outlook's ItemSend Event to BCC Emails

calendar date February 5, 2010 by · comment link

Browsing Google Blogs for VBA blog posts is an excellent use of your time. This time, I found a blog post on Windows Live by Michael Lu called Outlook Auto BCC VBA (link removed). He posted code that uses the ItemSend event to automatically add (and resolve) a BCC Recipient to outgoing emails.

I won't repost his code here; visit his post for that. What I will do is repost my comments, and add some more.

You do not need to resolve an email address; it will always resolve. Call the Resolve method on names you want to compare against the address book.

FYI- If you click Yes on the "Can not parse BCC email address" messagebox, the Cancel statement is skipped, but Outlook will still attempt to send the message with the unresolved recipient.

I forgot one other thing: The code doesn't check, but simply assumes that the outgoing item is an email and tries to add a Recipient to it. I can't predict the result if the item is actually a meeting request or task assignment.

So there are three things I wanted to point out here:

  1. Use the Recipient.Resolve or Recipients.ResolveAll methods if you're adding Recipients to an item as proper names (i.e. Item.Recipients.Add("Dan Wilson")). It's not necessary to resolve email addresses (eg: Item.Recipients.Add("dan.wilson@microsoft.com")).
  2. If a Recipient cannot be resolved, you'll see a dialog box from Outlook asking you to resolve the name manually. This may not be what you want (your end users) to see.
  3. Make sure the properties and methods you are calling are appropriate for the specific type of object you expect (if you use the generic Object type) or cast Object types into more specific types before working with them.

Related Articles:

categories Filed Under: Outlook · tags Tagged With: , ,
About JP

I'm just an average guy who writes VBA code for a living. This is my personal blog. Excel and Outlook are my thing, with a sprinkle of Access and Word here and there. Follow this space to learn more about VBA. Keep Reading »

Share This Article:

Share and bookmark this articledelicious buttonfacebook buttonlinkedin buttonstumbleupon buttontwitter button

comment bubble 8 Comments:

  1. Ray writes:
    February 5, 2010 at 9:26 am

    Jimmy -

    Love the Outlook automation … just about every post is useful in one way or another! On a subject somewhat related to this post — is there a way to auto-forward an email? Of course there's the built-in forwarding utility, but my company has turned that off …

    I'd like to be able to forward emails from a specific sender to an external email address ….

    Thanks alot — keep up the great work!

    Regards,
    ray

  2. sam writes:
    February 12, 2010 at 9:03 am

    Kind of OT.

    But is there a way to set a Rule for the Sent box folder which "MOVES" (Not copy) a mail sent to a specific e-mail address in to a different folder.

    • JP writes:
      February 12, 2010 at 10:02 pm

      In the Rules Wizard (Outlook 2003) I only see the option to move a copy to another folder. So you'd need VBA to do this. For example (this is air code), let's say you wanted to save messages sent to a specific person to an Inbox subfolder for that person's name:

      Private Sub Application_ItemSend(ByVal Item As Object, Cancel As Boolean)

On Error Goto ErrorHandler

Dim Msg As Outlook.MailItem
Dim moveFolder As Outlook.MAPIFolder

If TypeName(Item) <> "MailItem" Then Goto ProgramExit

Set Msg = Item
Set moveFolder = Outlook.Session.GetDefaultFolders(olFolderInbox).Folders(Msg.To)

If Msg.To = "your recipient" Then
  Set Msg.SaveSentMessageFolder = moveFolder
End If

ProgramExit:
  Exit Sub
ErrorHandler:
  MsgBox Err.Number & " - " & Err.Description
  Resume ProgramExit
End Sub
  3. Armando Montes writes:
    March 7, 2010 at 2:28 pm

    I found this short code for BCC:
    Private Sub Application_ItemSend(ByVal Item As Object, Cancel As
    Boolean)
    Item.BCC = "address@domain.de"
    Item.Recipients.ResolveAll
    End Sub
    http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?query=bcc&dg=microsoft.public.outlook.program_vba&cat=en_US_f2349ded-ffa8-474e-a28d-ef611f1d45b4&lang=en&cr=US&pt=&catlist=&dglist=&ptlist=&exp=&sloc=en-us

    • JP writes:
      March 7, 2010 at 8:30 pm

      Your code should check that it's a MailItem first.

      • Armando Montes writes:
        March 7, 2010 at 8:46 pm

        Thanks for your help, succesfully tested this and is working:
        Private Sub Application_ItemSend(ByVal Item As Object, Cancel As Boolean)
        Dim R As Outlook.Recipient
        Dim Address$

        Address = "abc@domain.com"

        Set R = Item.Recipients.Add(Address)
        R.Type = olBCC
        R.Resolve
        End Sub
        Do you know this DLL?
        Thanks again,
        Armando

        • JP writes:
          March 8, 2010 at 7:59 am

          What I'm saying is that your code assumes that the outgoing item is a MailItem. You want to check for that before trying to add a recipient.

Comments for this article are closed.

Site last updated: February 8, 2012