Windows 7 New providers ( Question 1. ) - hyberlink contact information ( question 2.)

stonefox

Active Member
Hi
My plans are to change Email providers, and when my current mail will be deleted, I have a wish to in good time to inform my contacts that my mail is will be changed.

1. Is it possible for Outlook 2013 to change my current sender mail, to the new, so recipients automatically reply back to my new address and the new provider's mail server?

2.
Can I in the mails I send make a hyberlink or anything else that makes it possible for the receiver to activate and thus be asked whether he will store this information in their mail program?
Thinking about the same function as when sending a text message to the recipient with a link on all your personal contact information, ready to be activated and stored on the recipient's phone.
 
Hi there,

I understand what you're trying to do, but that's not something that Outlook can do. You can however use either Mail Forwarding or subscribe to a Mail Forwarding service to accomplish this. You can then use the Outlook Contacts (Address Book) to send out an
"E-mail Change Notice" to a Distribution List of all your contacts. Outlook will not do this for you; you'll have to create a Distribution List (aka: Group List) from within your Outlook Contacts applet.

There are a couple of issues however with Mail Forwarding. The main issue is, that if you setup the Forwarding, you would be required to keep BOTH your existing and your new E-mail providers and addresses indefinitely in order for this to work. I'm guessing that this is not your intention here, but you'll have to confirm that. In a nutshell, how Forwarding works is that you send one of your contacts an E-mail, they reply back to you, but the Forwarding in Outlook intercepts that reply (say from you at [email protected]), and redirects that reply over to your new E-mail address (say [email protected]).

I don't believe your 2nd method will work, as a hyperlink by itself will not accomplish the contact activation. You'd have to write a Script such as a JScript or PHP program to be triggered upon the receipt of your E-mail by your contact. The problem here is you'd probably have to employ Microsoft Active-X in order to accomplish this goal. That is a major problem, as Outlook & Windows Live Mail, Win10 Mail [Microsoft's native E-mail clients], would reject that E-mail as most anti-virus and anti-malware programs today are set to reject any E-mails containing Active-X script programs since they are a huge security risk. Therefore, each of your contacts would have to be savvy enough to go into their AV or Security programs and disable the Active-X & JScript settings to unblock the E-mail from you. This is slightly easier if your contact is using either Windows Defender or Windows Live Essentials Security; but those settings are still not where the average user can find them; they'd have to call their computer guy, IT person, or make a phone call to Microsoft just to get your E-mail!!

However, having been an E-mail administrator at several different companies, I've run into this sort of request before. You may not be aware that this is a very common request, especially in the business world, as Companies are always relocating, getting bought out due to corporate downsizing, merging, etc. Because of this, it's created a niche market to do just what you are looking for. About 10 yrs. ago, clever programmers working for Mail Forwarding companies figured out how to write innocuous scripted programs to send an E-mail change notice from say John Smith, VP at XYZ Company to all his many contacts. XYZ company would use a free program to subscribe both his existing E-mail address [[email protected]] and his new E-mail address, [[email protected] E-mail]. The Mail Forwarding company (call them Mailit.com), would then capture all the E-mail replies sent from contacts by John Smith in response to the E-mail Change Address, and redirect them to the new E-mail address [[email protected]]. The contact's reply would then show up in his new inbox at the abc.org domain from that point forward. Of course this could be viewed in an Outlook inbox as well by JohnSmith.

What these Mail Forwarding companies did was usually provide a build-it-yourself form on their website that let a subscriber enter all their existing E-mail contacts manually 1 at a time into their form and store those E-mail addresses. Their E-mail server would then respond to replies coming from those addresses using the Mail redirection algorithm mentioned above. This was pretty easy if a User only had say 40 contacts. Not so much if they had 4,000 or 40,000 contacts. For most home users, and small businesses this worked great. The small law firm I worked for used one of these as most of their attorneys and clerks had less than 100 contacts. The owner, however was another problem as he had over 6,000 contacts.

Long and the short of it was, that because of the demand for this type of service, the free MF (Mail Forwarding) companies soon starting charging for their services and customized things. This allowed an executive or business owner to send in his Outlook E-mail contact list via PST file or other E-mail file such as a CSV file to the MF company. The MF company would then setup everyting for the Executive including the wording and the hyperlink you mention so contacts could click the link in the E-mail and add the contact new E-mail address into their address book for the update. This would work in most E-mail programs but not all. Some of the MF companies had a toll-free tech support number to call where they could help the contact update their address book over the phone. The notices were usually written with an expiration date in them, such as 30 days, 60 days or 1 year, and had verbage stating the auto-link update would expire due to the changeover in ISPs. That meant of course, the XYZ company would drop their existing E-mail provider (xyz.com domain) and all E-mail would then go to the new domain directly (abc.com domain). At that time period, say 30 days, the link would no longer work since the MF company no longer had an active link to the old E-mail domain (xyz.com). After 30 days if a contact attempted to reply to the E-mail it would no longer go through xyz.com, and if the user flagged that E-mail with a receipt, he would get a bounce since that user would no longer have an account on the xyx.com Mail server. This was the case if the business intended to drop their original E-mail address. Don't know if you're planning on doing that or not--you didn't say, but it's an important consideration.

This is probably more information than you wanted, but the short answer is no to your 2nd question, for the reasons elaborated upon above. And today, you can buy a short-term or long-term subscription to a MF service to help you accomplish your goal, but it's gonna cost you $$ sorry to say.

One other thing to know, is that many of the ISPs have written custom-code apps to deal with this changeover in E-mail addresses. For example both Cox and Verizon have a neat app that does part of what you are asking. Say a user is on Cox and moves out of their service area and has to change their ISP to Verizon (my case); and when I did this move 4 years ago, I used their app to notify my contacts that my new E-mail was going to be on verizon.net changing from the old cox.net where I used to live. I ran a test of about 25 contacts or so of people I knew well and contacted them by phone or facebook to see if they got my E-mail change notification. Most did. However, when I expanded the process to over 4,000 contacts in my Outlook PST file, it fell apart, and the verizon program couldn't handle such a large address book import. Unfortunately, the technology wasn't tested or intended to be used by business customers (they have a separate department that handles that for a fee), rather a convenience for home users with very small address books. That part worked ok.

If you decide to use method 1 above then, make sure you craft your E-mail change notification carefully, and if you intend to expire your original E-mail address, tell the people on your Dist List the date that will happen. Many folks leave notices like this in their inboxes for months before they get to them. If you have a user on your contact list who waits 10 months to try replying to your E-mail, and you've cancelled your ISP E-mail address after 60 days; he won't be able to do it, and your Outlook Mail Forwarding setup will fail for obvious reasons. He'll have to add your new E-mail address manually to his address book in whatever E-mail client he is using. There are lots of little exceptions like this that most people never think of--only E-mail administrators who've had to deal with all of them are aware.

Hope some of this proves useful to you; and sorry to be the bearer of bad news on method 2.

Best of luck,
<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>
 
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