Automated email define who it's sent from

[Robyn_P]

Hi. I'm hoping you can help.



Feel free to suggest entirely different solutions. I'm trying to implement a system that automatically emails users if the due date of their tasks has elapsed.

My current thoughts are to add code to the dashboard form onload event that checks for expired tasks and sends the emails (and then records that they've been sent so the process doesn't keep repeating). However this has a problem in that it means the emails would be sent from the email account of whoever happened to open the database at the opportune time. This could confuse the receivers in that the email could appear to come from someone completely unrelated to the task and upset the people whose outlook accounts I'm taking change of.

I don't have a dedicated database email address and I doubt I could convince work to allow me to set one up (though I could try). I don't want to restrict it to only work if it's be that loads the database (I'm the whole design team) due to holidays etc. What I see as ideal would be a way to hide the sender of the email so the receiver can't see it and can't reply to the email. Is there anyway to do this? Can anyone think of any other workable solutions? Worst case I'll roll with it and put a big warning at the start of the email but I'm not happy with that. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks. Robyn

[ranman256]

try the SentOnBehalfOfName

property:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...ame-in-outlook

[Gicu]

Hi Robyn,

I'm afraid you cannot "hide" the sender of the email, so unless you have a "shared" account and use sendonbehalfof (which in itself needs some work as it needs permissions for all the users of the db) I don't think you can do it. In these cases I used to implement my own db "messaging" functionality, please feel free to use it from http://forestbyte.com/ms-access-util...s-custom-chat/. It is fairly easy to implement and you have full control on its look, settings, messages.

Cheers,
Vlad

[Robyn_P]

Thanks both. Gicu, I can't access your code from the work computer, access is denied and with our FOSS requirements I probably wouldn't be allowed to use it anyway, but thank-you. ranman, I'd already seen that link but it didn't look like something I would have authority to do. Bit stumped. What I'm thinking of doing is getting a list of people who are happy for reminder emails to be sent from their accounts, I think that should be a reasonable solution. As a follow-on: can you define Rich Text formatting in an email created in VBA, i.e. the first line will be red and bold saying "THIS IS AN AUTOMATED EMAIL, PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO SENDER"?

[isladogs]

If you use CDO to send email from Access, you can specify the send address as being different to the real email address used.
This has many genuine uses as well as potential for abuse
For example, that's one way of setting up a do not reply email address

If you've never tried CDO email, have a look at my example app CDO EMail Tester