Restrictions in Outlook Automation? How to deal with failed cases?

[TerraEarth]

I recently finished setting up a Outlook automation program that populates emails with subject, body, address, etc. and attaches a PDF attachment through a name-lookup in a directory that holds many pdfs.



On one run I attempted to send two emails to myself yet one of the emails were never received, every single subsequent test run after this resulted in 0 failures. Is there some way to figure out whether or not a email has arrived or not at its destination or if there was some sort of error?

Secondly, I was wondering if you guys knew of any restrictions running this sort of program. I could easily imagine this being used for spam-purposes; are there safeguards against this built into access/vba/outlook? And if so what is the best way to work around it? Are there any hidden considerations that I may not have touched upon that more experienced users may be able to shed some light on for me in terms of potential pitfalls or hazards to this sort of program?

[Micron]

Arrived? not that I know of - beyond a read receipt, which the recipient does not have to provide
Restrictions for this sort of program? Without seeing it, hard to tell. The 5 second delay message for sending some emails from Access gets circumvented in a few ways, some more complicated than others (COM). I don't know of any safeguards beyond what an email server might impose on a connection/IP, so yes, spamming is possible, until you get blacklisted.
Are there any hidden considerations that I may not have touched upon... - again, without seeing, hard to tell. However, I can say that if you've ever been caught in a continuous loop, you can imagine what can happen if this happens to you during email sending. That's why I always used recordsets to determine the count of emails and set a loop counter accordingly. The number of emails sent by the db on a daily basis was not large because they were for non-conforming nags, but if there were only 10 records, I didn't want anyone calling me to say they suddenly had thousands of emails in their inbox. So once the loop reached that count, it was exiting regardless and I figured someone would let me know they got x number of emails for the same thing.

That's all I can think of.

[TerraEarth]

My program is quite straightforward, it creates a recordset and for each entry in the recordset until the .EOF of the recordset it pulls the names/emails/etc. and populates a outlook mailitem via the outlook library. It then attaches a pdf and sends it. If you guys could point out any improvements that might be made or issues i might run into, it would be appreciated.

I plan on testing it out and making adjustments as I go along.

Option Compare Database


Private Sub EmailTest()


Dim dbs As Database
Dim rstEmailList As Recordset
Dim oOutlook As Outlook.Application
Dim oOutlookMsg As Outlook.MailItem
Dim oOutlookRecip As Outlook.Recipient
Dim oOutlookAttach As Outlook.Attachment
Dim EmailAddress As String
Dim FilePath As String
Dim IndexCounter As Integer


Set dbs = CurrentDb
Set rstEmailList = dbs.OpenRecordset("tbl")


rstEmailList.MoveFirst


Set oOutlook = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
Do Until rstEmailList.EOF


Set oOutlookMsg = oOutlook.CreateItem(olMailItem)
FilePath = "C:\Users\RandomDirectory\" & rstEmailList![DocumentID] & ".pdf"
oOutlookMsg.Attachments.Add (FilePath)
EmailAddress = rstEmailList![POCEmail]


With oOutlookMsg
    Set oOutlookRecip = .Recipients.Add(EmailAddress)
    oOutlookRecip.Type = olTo
    .Subject = "document#: " & rstEmailList![DocumentID]
    .Body = "Hello " & rstEmailList![POCName] & ", Please review the attached PDF!"
    .Send
    Debug.Print ("Email#: " & rstEmailList![DocumentID] & " was sent!") 'for tracking email progress in console
End With
rstEmailList.MoveNext
Loop


Debug.Print ("#################### END SESSION ####################")
Set oOutlookMsg = Nothing
Set oOutlook = Nothing
End Sub

[Micron]

On my phone so will be succinct. To me these are concerns:
You don't have Option Explicit which should be at the top of every module. Seems you haven't set the option to require variable declaration. On that note, is "tbl" really as written?

Moving first on an empty recordset will cause an error. Should test or ensure there are records.
You have no error handling routine.
That's it for now.