But I don't wanna cut and paste!

April 14, 2008 2:54 PM

The Big Boss wants us to track activity created by individual emails he sends, but has no interest in copying his email addresses out of his Address Book (Outlook) into the web-based system we created.

So...any ideas on plugins or something for IE that can read his address book and give him an "autofill" in the "to" field or something like that? Or, alternately, allow Outlook to use the webform-created template? (Generated on-the-fly with unique ids for each recipient in the click-urls...let's us see what they do after they get the email, right?)

Other ideas very welcome as well. I'm personally allergic to the whole M$ enterprise, so any insight would be helpful.

posted by foxydot to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Get someone else to copy his email addresses into the web based system. Probably his secretary, who probably sends half his email in the first place.
posted by By The Grace of God at 2:56 PM on April 14, 2008

You can export contact lists from Outlook into various formats, like csv.

Then your web app can use ajax-y dropdown lists, like this. Via previous question.
posted by desjardins at 3:15 PM on April 14, 2008

It seems like a friendlier system would involve him sending e-mails to a special address, rather than using your web form. This would allow him to reply and forward e-mails as usual. Of course, he would still have to copy and paste the real addresses somewhere else.

Obviously this would be significantly more work for you.
posted by grouse at 3:57 PM on April 14, 2008