Send email with shortcut

Question

I am trying to troubleshoot an issue at the moment for several people who have an application crash several times per day.

We use RT to track issues, which are almost entirely sourced from email. I was thinking maybe I could give them a desktop shortcut to email our RT helpdesk address with a form email each time it happens - all the info I really need is when, how often and whether or not it is continuing to happen, so barely any content is needed. If they could double click on a shortcut to send an email like -

To: [e-mail]
Subject: Crash report

Crash reported at ${time} on ${date}

it would be everything I need.

FWIW the default email client on all machines is Outlook 2007.

I've googled for this - but my results are poisoned by info on keyboard shortcuts. Does anyone know of a working script I might be able to modify to my needs, or can point me to a method for doing this? I am no expert, but has some basic grounding in vbscript (though pretty much none in actual visual basic, discounting macro code).

Also worth noting is that a macro solution won't work for what we need - the employees in question barely use email and Outlook stays closed most of the day. If I can't convince them to open it up to type me an email I have doubts as to my chances of convincing them to open it up to click a toolbar button.

Answer 1

Copy the Blat executable over to their PCs. It's a command-line e-mail utility that's quite tiny (~300KB) and will allow you to set up a batch file shortcut to send out mails as required without needing to launch something as heavy as Outlook. You can use the %TIME% and %DATE% variables in the batch file.

Answer 2

For a simple solution, create a desktop URL shortcut and use the mailto protocol to generate an email template. The shortcut would contain something along the lines of mailto:[e-mail]?Subject=Crash%20Report. You can use this website to create an appropriate URL. Of course, this method will still require the user to click the Send button and will not automatically populate the message body with the current date and time, but you can still see when the message was sent by observing its headers.

Answer 3

This might be a overkill, but might at the same time hep you fix the problem.

Scan for Problems in Microsoft Outlook.

The Office Configuration Analyzer Tool (OffCAT) Analyzer Tool scans your Outlook profiles to identify any potential issues.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36852

If you are a Help Desk professional, you can also save the report to file so that the report can be viewed in the Office Configuration Analyzer Tool on another client where the tool is installed. The Office Configuration Analyzer Tool 1.0 also includes a command-line version that can be used to collect an OffCAT scan without user intervention.