Dosboy's Bits and Bytes

So last night I spent a few hours writing up a cool little inbox rule. I'm receiving daily reports in CSV format from my mail host which outline mailbox usage for our clients. I thought it'd be neat to create a rule which ran when these messages arrived and did the following:

1. Save CSV
2. Open CSV in Excel
3. Parse it to determine who is close to their Quota
4. Dump the near-quota users to a new email message
5. Send message to primary contact at client company

Pretty neat, right? Well, I almost had it working on Outlook 2007, then I made a change of some sort and it just stopped working. Everything. No message boxes, nothing. I created a new rule which displayed a "Desktop Alert" (Outlook rule thing) when it found these messages. That rule worked. I modifed it to run my script... nada.

So, I began testing today in Outlook 2003. After working out a few issues I had it working pretty well on Outlook 2003. I copy/pasted my script into Outlook 2007, created the same rule and ran it. Nothing. WTF is going on? I can't even get Outlook 2007 to run a basic MsgBox script when it finds storage report emails. But it'll display a "Desktop Alert" or other canned Outlook function. And, unless I'm missing something, there's no easy way to debug Inbox Rule scripts. They either run or they don't.

So, my general advice - don't give up your XP/Office 2003 boxes yet.

Argh!