If you are like me, you get a lot of email messages with attachments in your Outlook email account.  Wouldn’t it be nice to automate the migration of these attachments to a folder of your choosing?  Well, you can, and we will show you how.

First off, it pays to research your particular topic. If you are looking for an excellent primer, you can find some good information in the following book:

At my job, we have web pages that are automatically generated and emailed to us.  We are tired of manually moving these files to the appropriate web directory (in this case, samba shares that are mapped with drive letters assigned to them).  So, the logical solution is to use Outlook Rules to push the attachments to the mapped drive.  However, Outlook rules have one limitation: you can move messages to specific folders, but moving attachments is another matter that is almost impossible to perform with the default Outlook Rules wizard.  So, we are going to use Outlook’s built in Visual Basic Editor to create some custom code to drive the attachment migration.  Here is how we did it:

1. Open up Outlook.  I am using Outlook 2007, but this should also work in Outlook 2003.  Go to Tools>Macro>Visual Basic Editor.
   
2. With your project folder highlighted (in the top left, in the PROJECT pane; I just used the default project), right click and choose Insert>Module.  Copy and paste the following code into the main window of the editor:
   [vb]Sub SaveAttachmentsToDisk(Item As Outlook.MailItem)
   Dim olkFolder As Outlook.MAPIFolder, _
   olkAttachment As Outlook.Attachment, _
   objFSO As Object, _
   strRootFolderPath As String, _
   strFilename As String, _
   intCount As Integer
   ‘Change the following path to match your environment
   strRootFolderPath = "z:\www\departments\webreports\"
   Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
   Set olkFolder = Application.ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder
   If Item.Attachments.Count > 0 Then
   For Each olkAttachment In Item.Attachments
   If objFSO.GetExtensionName(LCase(olkAttachment.FileName)) = "htm" Then
   strFilename = olkAttachment.FileName
   intCount = 0
   Do While True
   If objFSO.FileExists(strRootFolderPath & strFilename) Then
   intCount = intCount + 1
   objFSO.deletefile (strRootFolderPath & strFilename)
   Else
   Exit Do
   End If
   Loop
   olkAttachment.SaveAsFile strRootFolderPath & strFilename
   End If
   Next
   End If
   Set objFSO = Nothing
   Set olkAttachment = Nothing
   Set olkFolder = Nothing
   End Sub[/vb]
3. You will need to ensure that you have the proper security level set in order to properly process the script. In Outlook, go to Tools>Macro> Security.  I chose No security check for macros.  This might be too loose of a restriction for your environment; if so, try the next highest setting.
4. Create a new Outlook rule (Tools>Rules and Alerts) to reflect your changes.  My rule looks for new messages from a specific email address and has an attachment (the web file that I want to move), moves the message to a specific folder (so I can have a backup of the message/attachment), then runs the module/script above to move the web file to the appropriate samba share.  Here is what my Rule Description looks like:

   
   
   Apply this rule after the message arrives
   from joeuser@email.com
   and which has an attachment
   and on this machine only
   move it to the WEBBACKUP folder
   and run Project1.SaveAttachmentsToDisk

5. Hit Apply and OK to save your rule. A couple of caveats: this is a client-side rule, so you must keep Outlook running in order for the rule to process. Also, the code will overwrite any file (in my case, in the target samba share) that has the same name as the attachment. If you only wish to make a copy, you can append a number to the attachment name. To do so, replace this line of code:

   objFSO.deletefile (strRootFolderPath & strFilename)

   with

   strFilename = "Copy (" & intCount & ") of " & olkAttachment.FileName 

   That’s it!

Thantos Office 2007