Processing Bounced Emails

[Eric1805]

I'm trying to create a VB function to generate a list of email address from bounced replies I've recieved without having to parse through the entire email body. From a "human" standpoint, this seemed easy; select the email, click on "Reply All" and the resulting email contains the info I need in the To: field. Ironically, if I first open the email, there is no "Reply All" option and the best i can tell all the VB code i've found over the last 2 days acts like this. Even without the Reply All from the main Outlook menu, I can see the email address(es) that bounced in the "To" column in my folder view...just can't figure out how to read that data. FYI, i'm on Outlook 2007.

Any ideas?

 

[Diane Poremsky]

You are trying to pick it up from the sent messages? Have you seen the examples at http://www.slipstick.com/developer/categorize-contacts-bad-addresses/ ? Those categorize contacts but you could just as easily create a text file.

 

[Eric1805]

No...as it happens i've copied all the bounced replies to a specail folder for processing.

I'm trying to generate a list of the email addresses I sent the original emails to without having to parse the bounced email. I saw a suggestion via Google that looked simple...loop through the folder, "Reply All" to each bounce email, extract the .Recipients, close the email. The first problem i ran into was the through VBA there didn't seem to be a "Reply All" (i got errors). As is dug into this and finally tried doing some things "manually", i discovered an odd thing (and the source of my question). When i'm in an Outlook folder looking at the list of bounced emails, i can select one and i see a "Reply All" button on the main Outlook menu that does exactly what i want (generates a new email item will the proper Recipients listed). BUT, if i first open the bounced email, i DON'T have a "Reply All" menu option. So, the VBA Reply All seems to act like the Open | Reply All. I was wondering if there was any VBA that would mimic the Reply All from the main Outlook menu. FYI, I first tried this using a "For Each MailItem in BouncedFolder" structure. Out of frustation i changed the code to a Do While working with .Selected items, but the results were the same.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

You can call reply all, but you don't need to do that to get the recipients list. Are the bounced addresses in the address field or in the message body? Most NDRs put the bad addresses in the body:

Delivery has failed to these recipients or groups:
address@domain.com

The macro I posted earlier looks for matching contacts but can easily be tweaked to do anything - this is the code block that "does something" and is what would be replaced.

Set myItem = myContacts.Find("[Email1Address]=" & strAddress) 
      
       If TypeName(myItem) = "ContactItem" Then 
          If Not TypeName(myItem) = "Nothing" Then 
            myItem.Categories = myItem.Categories & ";Delete" 
                Debug.Print strAddress & " Delete" 
            myItem.Save 
         End If 
        End If

If the addresses really are in the to/cc field, this macro can be used: http://www.slipstick.com/developer/recipient-email-address-sent-items/

It adds the addresses to a new field in the folder but it can be tweaked to do something else with them, or you can copy the field and paste into Excel to work with them. (Remove all other fields from the view, then select all, copy and paste)