Access Cookbook

Add a Contact and Send Email Through Outlook

Problem

You maintain an Access database full of contact information. You’d like to be able both to add contact information to your Outlook address book and to send email messages easily, using the email address stored in a particular row. How can you add these features to your form without forcing your users to load Outlook and work there?

Solution

Outlook provides a rich programming model, and it’s easy for you to programmatically create contacts and send email. You’ll find that solving these problems requires little more than creating an object in memory, setting some properties, and calling the correct methods. This sample provides a form that demonstrates code you can use.

Warning

Because of the serious threat of email viruses, the Outlook team has “locked down” the programmability features of Microsoft Outlook. The level of the virus support may be different depending on which version of Outlook you have installed and what service release you’ve added. In testing this demonstration, you may see an alert warning you that someone is attempting to modify your address book. You can safely dismiss that dialog for this demonstration, but you should never take it lightly in real use.

Load and run frmContacts from 12-08.MDB. This form, shown in Figure 12-17, allows you to edit contact information within Access. You can click on Send Email to create a new email message to the address you’ve provided in the contact record. Click on Add Contact ...