Outlook – Automate printing of more than 10,000 emails and their attachments, including the contents of ZIP files

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For some unholy reason I am required by work to print out 10,500 e-mails AND their attachments (which accompany about 70% of the e-mails) through Outlook 2010. I, like you, am appalled at such ridiculous inefficiency and the 55,000 pieces of paper we have estimated this will cost us and the world. Nevertheless, it's going to happen either manually (what we've been doing for the past two days) or automatically (please god help us).

These need to be ordered so that each e-mail sits on top of its respective attachment and is chronologically printed. So email 1, attachment 1, email 2, attachment 2, etc. The attachments can come in Powerpoint, Excel, Word Docs, and most troublesome of all: zip files.

Here's what I have tried so far:

In Outlook "Options" –> "Print Options" –> Select Print with Attachments
Converting all mail into a .eml file and printing from the folder
Using a third party mail add-on (by Sperrysoftware) to convert all e-mails into pdfs and export to a folder. Taking this folder and reordering it by date and printing out the pdfs.

Here's why none of it worked so far:

Outlook's Print with Attachments setting rarely works for documents with macros in them. Above all, it doesn't work with zip files and just passes these over.
Obviously .eml files can't directly be printed or read outside a mail client. I actually think this is still our most promising effort as it is indeed the entire mail file represented in a stable format, separated, and outside a mail client–meaning they are workable. I can't seem to find a third-party software that would effectively let me convert the e-mails AND their respective compressed and variously formatted attachments into printable files. If you know of one, we are also willing to spend in excess of a 200 Euro on software.
This software was promising at first. But the macro breaks frequently and it also recognizes our company's e-mail signatures as attachments.

If you can offer any advice at all this would be of huge help to us. We're currently opening every e-mail, its respective 3 – 4 attachments, and printing them via each attachment's respective printing dialogue. This will take five of us one month, so your input would be highly valued!

Best Answer

MsgExtract can batch print email messages from different email sources and also convert email formats.

It can batch print the emails and its attachments in chronological order. We have added in the latest build the ability to decompress and print zip attachments as per your requirement.
It can save Outlook email as EML files
It can save Outlook email as PDF files
It can download the images that are linked in the html part of the message and include them in the resulting format (PDF files, printer...)

For printing the attachments MsgExtract relies on the Windows Shell print associations, if no association exists for the attachment file extension it is skipped.

You can learn more about MsgExtract batch printing at:

http://docs.maildev.com/article/122-how-do-i-batch-print-email-messages-and-its-attachments

(Disclaimer, I am the author of MsgExtract)

Related Solutions

Microsoft Excel – How to Print Spreadsheet Files Automatically

I used AutoIt to make a script that opens Excel, opens the only file (which begins with "elec") in a specified folder (which begins with "viat"), prints it, closes Excel, then runs a batch file to archive the file it just printed.

Here is the code of the AutoIt script file. I was banging my head on this for a while until I discovered that I needed the Sleep commands to make it work properly.

Run("C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\Excel.exe")
WinWaitActive("Microsoft Excel")
Send("^o")
WinWaitActive("Open")
ControlClick("Open", "", 1148)
Send("c:\viat{DOWN}{ENTER}")
Sleep(1000)
Send("elec")
Sleep(1000)
Send("{DOWN}{ENTER}")
WinWaitActive("Microsoft Excel")
Send("^p")
Sleep(1000)
Send("{ENTER}")
Sleep(1000)
WinClose("Microsoft Excel")
Sleep(1000)
Run(""C:\Users\Chris\Documents\ViaTrack Archives\archiver.bat"")

And here is the code of archiver.bat:

move "C:\ViaTrack Reports\*.*" "C:\Users\Chris\Documents\ViaTrack Archives"

It's extremely simplistic coding, but it gets the job done. The main drawback of this script is that it will cause Excel to throw an error if the file does not exist in the folder. However, it is scheduled to run about an hour after the file is normally emailed to me, to allow for any unexpected delays.

The file is normally emailed at 5:40 AM every weekday. Historically, it's never arrived later than 5:45. Mail Attachment Downloader is set up to check for new attachments every 15 minutes.

It worked just fine this morning. The Billing Department Manager was happy to come in and find that her report was waiting for her on the printer, and she didn't have to print it out herself.

Email Migration – Pumping Mails into IMAP Account

If you still have access to the original service, the best method by far is to use the tool ìmapsync (or OfflineIMAP as an alternative).

This will allow you to temporarily sync from the old service to the new one. It will retain all of the flags as well so that unread markers are retained. It will also retain any folder structures.

The second most common way of achieving this would require some careful coordination of mail routing. That would be a file copy of the source data which would normally be either in maildir or mbox format. This may also require help from the previous mail provider unless you have shell access to the old service.

imapsync is certainly the preferred method. Trying to do a transfer using eml files is not recommended. For starters, you will have lost all of the flags and folders. In addition, trying to do this for 5-6GB per user is going to take a LONG time. You will have to do it in stages.

Additionally, I'm not really sure that Pine or MUTT is going to help doing it the way you've outlined although you may be able to write macro's to transfer the files a few at a time.

UPDATE:

As we now know that sync from the original is not possible. The best way to script input from EML files to a maildir based system (if that is what you have, it is the most common storage format for Linux IMAP servers) is to use

getmail_maildir ~/Maildir/ < email_file.eml

getmail_maildir is part of the getmail package. This only works if you have direct access to the mail folders though this is commonly true with the better hosts. Not so sure about doing this with the other mail storage format mbox but I think that getmail also has a getmail_mbox command. In addition, the Windows application "IMAPSize" has a command for converting from EML to mbox.

So again, it is much easier to migrate the emails to a physical mail store rather than trying to pass everything through IMAP. However, it may be that you have to do this because the new provider cannot provide suitable access (as would be the case if migrating to GMail for example).

If this is the case, what may be best is to migrate the EML files to maildir format using a "synthetic" local maildir (there is nothing really special about maildir except the naming conventions so you don't actually need an IMAP server to use them) and getmail_maildir. Then use IMAPSync or OfflineIMAP to push from that local maildir to the new service. That way you don't need to mess with trying to script MUTT.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Microsoft Excel – How to Print Spreadsheet Files Automatically

Email Migration – Pumping Mails into IMAP Account

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