HowTo-Outlook

The Lucatec® Mask Add-in for Microsoft Office Outlook® is a small utility which automates certain routine tasks if you have set up public eMail accounts for individual departments, branches or tasks of your organization.

Apart from your personal eMail address/mailbox you may have access to one or more shared mailboxes or Public Folders, e.g. for your department or for special functions like user support. If you want to send an eMail on behalf of that team or function you have to manually enter the respective sender address into the “From” field. Otherwise the mail would be sent from your personal email address and any replies would end up in your personal mailbox rather than in the team’s folder (and you would have to remember to move same to the shared mailbox for other users to be able to view it). You might furthermore have to take care to use a special message signature appropriate to the current sender.

This is where Lucatec® Mask steps in: It will automatically determine the correct sender address, save target and signature to use based on the current folder context (e.g. whether the user is currently inside a shared mailbox or mail-enabled Public Folder). It can set the sender address to any arbitrary address that the user has been granted “Send On Behalf Of” or “Send As” permissions for.

Lucatec® Mask’s default behaviour was designed with the most common scenarios in mind. For instance, mails sent from a mail-enabled Public Folder or any of its sub-folders will automatically be sent on behalf of that folder and the respective sent messages will also be stored inside that very folder. Likewise, messages sent from within a shared mailbox will naturally be sent on behalf of that mailbox and be saved in that mailbox’s Sent Items folder. All this will work right from the get go without you having to perform any additional configuration. It doesn’t stop there, though: If your requirements are more complex than these two examples you have a powerful set of individual configuration options readily available at your finger tips to fine-tune the behaviour.

Feature Overview

• automatically determines appropriate sender properties of shared Exchange® Server mailbox accounts and mail-enabled Public Folders without further need to perform manual configuration
• automatically sets the From field depending on your current location in the Outlook folder tree
• optionally moves or copies sent messages to the relevant mailbox’s Sent Items folder, the originating Public Folder itself or a freely selectable folder of your own choice
• allows to auto-insert signatures depending on the current folder selection – different signatures can be defined for new messages and replies or forwards respectively
• allows overriding of sender properties for individual folders, even when they’re not mail-enabled otherwise (useful e.g. for sub-folders of mail-enabled public folders or for sorting messages sent from a public folder into a different, dedicated folder)
• intelligently handles sender properties when replying to or forwarding messages regardless of the current folder selection
• evaluates folder options recursively, i.e. if you need the same sender/signature settings for multiple sibling or nested folders, it is sufficient to have them defined for the top-level folder – a per-folder override (see above) is still possible
• allows to define a list of valid senders which you could then select from a dropdown list before sending a message. This list can optionally be auto-populated by scanning the available mailboxes and Public Folders in your Outlook profile.
• allows to associate options with valid senders, i.e. when you change the sender manually the sent message will automatically be moved to the target folder associated with that sender regardless of what folder you had selected when you created the new message.
• provides a popup dialog to view and edit options applied to the current message. This dialog could also be shown automatically whenever you send a message thus allowing you to verify (and possibly correct) the sender selection on the fly. This could be suppressed selectively based on whom you’re sending the message to.
• allows to display the actual sender of sent messages as an additional column in folder views without disclosing this information to recipients.
• can also be used with non-Exchange mail servers (see Version 2.0 Release Notes for details on requirements for this)
• allows globally defining sender/signature settings to be used for all messages on a per-user basis – a per-folder override (see above) is still possible
• installer optimized for unattended mass-deployment, i.e. allows to perform scripted registration and setting of default options at installation time
• tested on Microsoft Exchange® Server 2003, Microsoft Outlook® XP, 2003 and 2007 with the latest Service Packs
• supports Microsoft Windows® 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7 Beta 1 and both Windows 2003 and 2008 Server with the latest Service Packs