Outlook treats first email created by Excel differently

Hi folks,

I have some VBA code in Excel which loops through a list of email addresses, creates an email to each one and saves the emails in the Outlook drafts folder.

If Outlook is already running when my code starts then everything works as planned and all the emails are saved to Outlook's drafts folder.

However, if Outlook is not already running when my code starts then the FIRST email always appears in the INBOX, and not always straight away. e.g. If I run my code without Outlook loaded and immediately start up Outlook afterwards, then all the emails except the first one are present in the Drafts folder; then, about a minute or so later, Outlook's Inbox will update to show "1 unread message" which is always the first email in the list. Clicking Outlook's send/recieve button does nothing to speed up the appearance of this rogue first email.

I have worked around this odd behaviour by asking the user to start up Outlook if it is not already running, but I was just wondering whether any of you have experienced this before, or if anyone has any ideas for a less intrusive solution?

Cheers

EDIT: Forgot to say I already tried creating a "dummy" first email and just deleting it instead of saving it to the Drafts folder, but that made no difference. It seems to be the first ".Save" method on an Outlook.MailItem that causes this behaviour. Invoking the .Save method then immediately attempting to delete the saved message won't work either, because it is not in the Drafts folder, nor will it appear in the Inbox until many seconds later.

Please post your VBA code so we can see which method you use to connect to Outlook.

I think this would do

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The faster the code the less you need a progressBar.

I think the problem lies here:

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You don't need this check as you can see in my code.

That's what userforms are for: preventing users to work in worksheets.

I am facing the same problem. VBA is configured to send a single mail after generating a PDF.
This draft email appears in the InBox and not immediately.
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Moderator's Edit: Use code tags when you post code. To do so in future, select your code and click on # icon at the top of your post window.

It seems to me that this is something that's going wrong at the application level*. Removing the .Close method on the generated message caused things to work correctly for me, but then I was creating multiple messages. You could try adding a .Close after your .Save and see if that works?

* The reason I say this is that I have observed the same behaviour in Office 2003 when using "Email > As attachment" from Excel's "File" menu. (Once the Outlook message editor opens, instead of sending the email click Save then close the editor. The saved message does not appear in Outlook's Drafts folder and some time later it appears in the Inbox.)