Automatically send emails with Outlook

I'm looking to send a bunch of files automatically to my customers. At the moment, I have around 100 files per day, which I have to identify, then attach manually to an email and send to each customer. As you can imagine, this is quite time consuming and I'd like to find a way to automate it.

The files do contain the name of the customer, but not their email address. Is there some way I could write a script in Outlook, which could find the name from the file, then match it up with the address book, create the email and then attach the file? I can program in Visual Basic, but it looks quite difficult to do with that. I know nothing about scripting in Outlook, but somebody has advised that that may be the best way forward.

 

I don't know the answer, but I have been scripting with MS Office products quite a bit lately, and I've always found googling Microsoft Officeproduct Object Model (where office product is the app you're trying to script) is VERY handy. For Excel and Access, this has given me a complete list of ALL their objects, methods and properties.

 

Actually, on a closer look, I found this link, which contains a list of all Outlooks objects, properties and methods. (You'll want to view this with IE for easiest function)

From there, you'll just need to be sure that there's some property of the files you are sending that can be referenced in your address book.

If you have any more questions, I'll be glad to help! I LOVE vb programming.

 

Different method of thought, why not use an ftp server which is designed for this type of file distribution. That way you just mail customers the ftp server info, then put what ever files there either manually or by a batch file, then have them check the ftp server for the needing files.

 

Thanks for the ideas guys. No disrespect to my customers, but I think the ftp idea will be a bit too complex for many of them. I think the Outlook/VB macro/script idea is probably the way to go. Unfortunately it's all way above my head. I can do some simple VB stuff, but all the stuff on the website was a bit above me. On my Outlook menu, there was no macro command at all, so I assume I need to upgrade Outlook and/or get some kind of VB plugin?