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

Question

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:

1. In Outlook "Options" --> "Print Options" --> Select Print with Attachments

2. Converting all mail into a .eml file and printing from the folder

3. 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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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!

Solution

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

1. 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.
2. It can save Outlook email as EML files
3. It can save Outlook email as PDF files
4. 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)

Comments

[bwDraco]

Although your answers have been relevant, most or all of them are promotional in nature. This is likely to result in your account being suspended. If you'd like to promote your own products, please consider purchasing ads on Stack Exchange. See also the help center and meta.superuser.com/questions/2352/recommending-own-products

[jponce]

I have tried to be helpful providing a relevant answer. The product can surely help user4167750 solve his printing task, I am not aware of any other existing option other than custom programming as someone suggested. Should I have refrained from posting knowing that I have a relevant solution? In any case I have now read the self-promotion section in the FAQ and understand that you are trying to avoid spam to maintain the quality of the site.

[user4167750]

@jponce, I really appreciate your answer here. This looks like it could really solve our problem. We can indeed get all of the e-mails into a .eml file. There will be two further (I believe minor) problems however. If you have any input on them, this would further speed up the process. 1) Our signatures are appearing as attachments. We have downloaded the original e-mails from Lotus Notes, which has caused this to happen upon their import into Outlook. 2) Many of our Excel files are +15 sheets. We have a special print setting for them--will I be able to apply this print setting to all xls?

[user4167750]

I really appreciate your time on this. I have found code similar to this, but it tends to gloss over zip files (which are at least 50% of our attachments). I think, the VBA might need to have to go a step further and invoke C++ at some point in order to access a zip extracting agent. Further, I think WinZip might be too cumbersome an extracting agent. I would say which ones I think might work for this, but I think the moderator is already touchy with the software promotional aspects of this post.

[Raystafarian]

Does it still skip .zip files? Maybe that's a system-wide setting or an argument that can be passed to winzip via vba. Does the code error out or does it just not print the .zip?

[jponce]

@user4167750, about the problems that you mention: 1) we have implemented an attachments filter that can remove and filter attachments by file name. If your signature attachments have consistent names across the messages then it could solve the problem. 2) I am not sure if Excel print settings are persistent. For printing we use the attachment’s file extension to find a Windows shell association and then launch it passing the attachment’s file name as a parameter.