Need help BCCing entire Outlook autofill contact list
Today is my last day at work and my boss wants me to BCC anyone I have ever sent an email to announce my departure.
I have tried exporting all my sent messages and trimming the list by advanced sorting out the duplicate email addresses in excel, but messages with multiple recipients are plentiful and need to have the emails separated into individual cells at the very least.
I also tried the .NK2 file route. I downloaded the MFCMAPI program to find my hidden autofill contact file, but it can only be exported as an .xml or .msg file and I don't know how to handle those files properly to get the data I need.
Does anyone here have a solution to automatically add every autofill contact on Outlook as BCC recipients for a final email?
EDIT: I found a solution that worked for both of us. I emailed the clients I remember as the most important and set up an automated reply to handle those I forgot to message.
Don't do it exactly as asked. This is a bit of a rediculous request. If your manager or IT can't point to a quick way to do it, I would do this: Send the email to the people you work with most frequently and can remember. Then set an auto reply for people that randomly email you. Your IT team will eventually deactivate your inbox and people that still don't know will find out when they email you. It's your last day, don't stress.
It's also BCC so good luck figuring out who it was sent to.
High profile targets is a good idea. No more is necessary.
This is the way, I'd send it to some high traffic clients to cover the bigger jobs and say "ok boss, all done!" and move on with life.
I'm not sure what your boss is asking you to do is possible, unless all those people are already in your contacts list... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/how-can-i-download-a-list-of-all-people-emailed/e61284f2-6f39-469b-8017-2ce543701060
Two things:
I suggested the auto-reply message as well so that anyone who tries to contact me in the future will be directed to contact my replacement. I may just do that instead because I can't see how I could be punished since it's my last day.
References, obviously. Unless you're burning this bridge so thoroughly that you're going to omit the fact you ever worked there from your resume.
If OP really wants to solve this, an archive of emails plus a python script to get all emails, filter unique, combine and print is the best bet. But by the time it’s written and debugged… there are better uses of time on OPs last day… like making sure employment documents, healthcare info, etc are sent to personal email as a backup or printed since that stuff can be hard to find once access is lost
I've had friends depart jobs and have former clients that they haven't spoken to in over 8 years still contact them 3 years after departure because somewhere deep in a client database they were listed as the only contact for support.
It wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea if you were client-facing support to send out such a huge blast. Although at a certain point, that's really the company's responsibility and they could maybe add it as a footnote in a newsletter.
Bad ideas only: set an auto reply that is backdated to your start date and autoreply to every email you received. (my SO accidentally did this once, not actually sure how she pulled it off)
As other have said, just do a good enough job. Key clients, coworkers, people that your boss would think of. Call it good from there. A pretty stupid request. If you're that important of a contact in the business either you'd have a general inbox that your replacement would take over, or your relationships are personal enough that the business would have it's own strategy to alert key people of your departure.
my suggestion is not technical, but instead of that, I would just let a few of your clients know and then just tell your boss you sent it to everyone. There’s really no need to send an email to everybody that you’ve ever worked with. Just make sure that whoever your boss would possibly ask is on the list of BCC‘s, your boss won’t be able to see the BCC anyway, it seems a little silly to do what he wants.
I know if I was a recipient who hasn’t spoken to you in a while, I’d be annoyed by the spam. Plus a BCC is a little bit impersonal. IMO it’s up to your boss to let them know if/when it’s prudent.
Your boss is doing it wrong. Your boss or IT dept should be setting up your address as an alias on another email account - who ever is taking over your work load. So anything that gets sent to ackables@whatever.com gets delivered to newguy@whatever.com. No need to let everyone know and better continuity from the business perspective if there is someone ready to help with the clients next problem. If you send the email out and let them know there may be some people that would choose to go elsewhere if they can't work with you and never even bother contacting the company again. It depends on the type of business and the relationship you have with your customers though.
If you can get it on XML, you can run it through an online tool to convert XML to CSV, which probably flattens everything into a row. You could then delete the columns you don't need and use a formula to create a semi-colon delimited list of addresses you can BCC.
Seems silly though, but that might do the trick.
ChatGPT&Co might be able to help with that. I've recently had to do something similar to OP but the other way around. It created a Google apps script which outputted a spreadsheet containing all unique senders for me.
A bit tedious, but a good way to cast a wide net without any special programming:
If you go into your inbox and sort by sender, you can start at the A's and work down. If you do the same in your sent mail, you'll get the people you normally send to. You can surf these lists on half a screen with your email open on the other half to type into auto complete. The people you email most often will be big chunks, and if you miss a one–liner, probably no big deal because you only ever sent them one email.
If you are in sales or something where your inbox is 3 emails from thousands of people, disregard.