Retrieve old e-mail through an Access form?

[jimmonator]

I am a rank novice and need assistance. This question has two parts. They are separate yet related.

Working in Access 2007, I have a Contacts form which contains a button. This button opens Outlook and creates a new blank e-mail to the current contact.

Question 1:
I want this button to additionally create a new corresponding record in a related Donor_Letters database, which contains additional notes and information about each specific correspondence. Each record in Donor_Letters would reference a specific e-mail sent from, and archived in, Outlook. Once I enter text into an Outlook e-mail and hit Send, I would like the text, subject and date of that e-mail recorded in the appropriate Donor_Letters record in Access.



Question 2:
The donor letters should then be retrievable through the same Contacts form, by means of a combo box listing the Donor_Letters records. Select a letter from the Donor_Letters drop-down, and view a subform of the full Donor_letters record containing in one of its fields the text of the original mail, non-editable, plus a link to the actual Outlook e-mail as archived in Outlook if needed, (just to confirm to ourselves that the original exists and was actually sent.) That Outlook archiving might need to be automated, too, in such a way as to move the e-mail to an archive folder upon sending.

To avoid getting too much going at once, I'd like to solve question one and then move on to question 2. Anyone feel up to helping me figure this out?

Thanks in advance to anyone who helps me. Book, tutorials, they never seem to get at the specifics of what I want to know. It's you contributors on various forums who have helped me on so many projects over the years, and I thank you all very much.

Jim

[NTC]

well none of this is novice stuff, and complex enough that it is tough to explain via a forum post.

question 1 is do-able for sure.
question 2 - - I don't believe it is feasible to link to emails inside outlook; one can link to outlook tables i.e. contacts - - but old emails are not in tables. So I think conceptually what you need to do is store, in the db, the info that makes that email findable i.e. sender, date, etc - - and trust the outlook administration to keep those emails.

not sure this helps, but maybe a little.