Emailing a preset email draft from Access

[jbickl]

Hello,



In brief: In my database, I need to have a button on a form which when pressed (1) pulls the email address from the displayed record on that form, (2) loads an Outlook instance, (3) in that Outlook instance, load a drafted email for editing and sending.

More detailed: My form, frmReferrals, contains the email address of a contact. I need to have a button, cmdEmail, which loads the email address of the displayed record in an Outlook instance. Ideally, I would like the loaded Outlook instance to pull some other information from the form. For example, I would like it to pull the name of the contact and display it.

Something like this:
"Dear " & [FirstName] & " " & [LastName] & ","
Leads to this:
"Dear John Smith,"

There would be a lot more text in the email with other information to input automatically, but I could probably figure that out if someone can help get me started with this. Also, I have done very basic VBA... I would prefer to use as little coding as possible... but I suspect that all of this will have to be done with coding. Beggars can't be choosers.

Any help is much appreciated!

[pdebaets]

This link may help:

Sending an E-Mail Message from Access
http://peterssoftware.com/c_emfa.htm

[jbickl]

Thanks for your help!

My question really isn't how to send an email, though; I already knew how to do that. My question is about loading a pre-written email into the outlook instance once it opens and then filling in information in the body of the email. I think the problem is that Access seems to allow only 255 characters in the Message part of the email, so I'm trying to find a way around this.

Thanks!