Make Those Pesky Outlook Security Warnings Disappear by Programming Express ClickYes

Express ClickYes also takes care of this one when you’re trying to send a catalog to your customers using your bulk emailing software:

As promised, this month we‘ll control Express ClickYes programmatically so you can Suspend and Resume it at will. We‘ll do this in Outlook VBA, although you can do it in any programming language. ContextMagic has examples in many languages on their web site on this page: Manage Express ClickYes from your own software using command line parameters (http://www.contextmagic.com/express-clickyes/for-developers.htm). Using this as our excuse, we‘ll explore the basics of Outlook VBA programming, write an Application_ItemSend event handler, and learn about Outlook read receipts and MailItem and Recipient objects.

The Scenario

Let‘s say there‘s a certain person that is unreliable about responding to your emails. Maybe you‘d like to get a Read Receipt from that person every time you send them an email. A Read Receipt is something like sending Certified Mail with a Return Receipt – you get a notification back by email when the recipient reads the email (unless they decline to send the receipt when prompted, and that‘s another story). In any case, you don‘t want to request a read receipt from everyone you send email to – you‘ll drive them all nuts with those prompts to see if it‘s OK to send the receipt. So you just want to request it from this one recipient.

When in Outlook, you can request a read receipt while composing a message by clicking on

View / Options… / Voting and
Tracking Options / Request a read receipt for this message

. Easy enough. But maybe it‘s too much trouble to remember to do that… perhaps you want Outlook to do it automatically for you. VBA to the rescue!

How to Do It

Go into Outlook, select

Tools / Macro / Visual Basic
Editor

(or just hit Alt-F11). This opens the Visual Basic Editor, showing the VbaProject.OTM project. Get more information about working with the Visual Basic Editor in my article Did You Forget Something? (TechTrax, April 2004).

' ThisOutlookSession:

Option Explicit

Private Sub Application_ItemSend(ByVal Item As Object, Cancel As Boolean)
    If Item.Class <> olMail Then Exit Sub
    Dim r as Recipient
    For Each r In Item.Recipients
        If StrComp(r.Address, "theemailaddress@thedomain.com", vbTextCompare) = 0 Then
      	    Item.ReadReceiptRequested = True
            MsgBox "Requesting Read Receipt from " & r.Name
        End If
    Next
End Sub

Notice we‘re first making sure this is an MailItem; this is up to you. Then we‘re checking each Recipient in the Recipients collection to see if the email address matches the person we want read receipts from. We use the strcomp function with the vbTextCompare parameter to perform a case-insensitive string comparison. strcomp returns 0 if the two strings match. If they do, we request a read receipt in the MailItem and alert the sender that we‘re doing this. We exit the ItemSend event handler normally and Outlook sends the email with the read receipt requested. Easy enough. Test it by sending mail to the person who‘s email address is listed and then checking the email in your Sent Items folder. Open the email‘s View / Options… dialog and notice the read receipt was requested.

The Issue

Recent versions of Outlook will pop up the security warning when referencing the Recipients collection of the MailItem, saying, “A program is trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in Outlook. Do you want to allow this?” As we saw last month, Express ClickYes can prevent this dialog from appearing. However, you don‘t want to prevent it all the time, because the dialog‘s purpose is to protect you from viruses! But if we know we want to enable Express ClickYes just for this exact purpose, we can do that programmatically using the API (Application Program Interface) provided by ContextMagic.

Here are two functions and supporting code which will suspend and resume Express ClickYes: Create a new module by clicking

Insert /
Module

, change the name of the module (use the Properties pane) from Module1 to modClickYes, and then enter the following code:

' modClickYes:

Option Explicit

' Declare Windows' API functions
Private Declare Function RegisterWindowMessage _
    Lib "user32" Alias "RegisterWindowMessageA" _
    (ByVal lpString As String) As Long

Private Declare Function FindWindow Lib "user32" _
    Alias "FindWindowA" (ByVal lpClassName As Any, _
    ByVal lpWindowName As Any) As Long

Private Declare Function SendMessage Lib "user32" _
    Alias "SendMessageA" (ByVal hwnd As Long, _
    ByVal wMsg As Long, ByVal wParam As Long, _
    lParam As Any) As Long

' Call this before doing something you want ClickYes to be active on.
Public Sub ResumeClickYes()
    Dim hwnd As Long
    Dim msg As Long
    Dim result As Long

    ' Register a message to send
    msg = RegisterWindowMessage("CLICKYES_SUSPEND_RESUME")

    ' Find ClickYes Window by classname
    hwnd = FindWindow("EXCLICKYES_WND", 0&)

    ' Send the Resume message to Resume ClickYes (that‘s the 1 in the third parameter)
    result = SendMessage(hwnd, msg, 1, 0)

End Sub

' Call this after doing something you wanted ClickYes to be active on.
Public Sub SuspendClickYes()
    Dim hwnd As Long
    Dim msg As Long
    Dim result As Long

    ' Register a message to send
    msg = RegisterWindowMessage("CLICKYES_SUSPEND_RESUME")

    ' Find ClickYes Window by classname
    hwnd = FindWindow("EXCLICKYES_WND", 0&)

    ' Send the Suspend message to Resume ClickYes (that‘s the 0 in the third parameter)
    result = SendMessage(hwnd, msg, 0, 0)

End Sub

Now what you can do is call these two functions when you want to enable and disable Express ClickYes. Basically your flow would be this:

When we‘re done, we disable Express ClickYes so our virus protection is back in place. We only enable Express ClickYes during the brief period of time that we‘re accessing the Recipients collection.

Putting It All Together

' ThisOutlookSession:

Option Explicit

Private Sub Application_ItemSend(ByVal Item As Object, Cancel As Boolean)
    If Item.Class <> olMail Then Exit Sub
    Dim r as Recipient
    ResumeClickYes ' Add this line...
    For Each r In Item.Recipients
        If StrComp(r.Address, "david@soundsidesoftware.com", vbTextCompare) = 0 Then
      	    Item.ReadReceiptRequested = True
            MsgBox "Requesting Read Receipt from " & r.Name
        End If
    Next
    SuspendClickYes ' And this one!
End Sub

When you‘re done, save your VbaProject.OTM project by hitting File / Save VbaProject.OTM.

Wrap Up

Next Month

Next month, we‘ll learn about VBA Classes by turning the Suspend and Resume code into a Class. In a future article, we‘ll delve deeper into how the Suspend and Resume code works, explaining the Declare statement and the RegisterWindowMessage, FindWindow and SendMessage Win32 API functions.

Make Those Pesky Outlook Security Warnings Disappear by Programming Express ClickYes - Part 2

Figure 1 – A program is trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in Outlook