SurfCube on Mango Part 5 - Getting email addresses for Beta testers

In SurfCube, we have had the “send email feedback” feature since V1. Needless to stay, we have received tons of feedback. Actually, this feedback is what drove the development of the app – they helped us identify pain points, missing features and even told us when something was done right, and users loved what they saw.

The about screen of SurfCube 4 Beta 1 with the Send feedback button.

So, now with the first public Beta of SurfCube approaching, naturally we want to let those people know about it who cared enough about the product in the past to voice their opinions. And here comes the challenge: how to get their email addresses? Outlook has no “reply to all these people in a single mail” feature. So, here is a small VB Macro that helped (press ALT-F11 to open the Macro editor):

   1:  Sub GetSelectedEmailAddresses()

   2:   

   3:  Dim SelectedMails

   4:  Set SelectedMails = Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection

   5:   

   6:  Dim dic As New Dictionary

   7:  Dim strEmail As String

   8:  Dim strEmails As String

   9:   

  10:  Dim objItem As Object

  11:  For Each objItem In SelectedMails

  12:  If TypeName(objItem) = "MailItem" Then

  13:      strEmail = objItem.SenderEmailAddress

  14:      If Not dic.Exists(strEmail) Then

  15:          strEmails = strEmails + strEmail + ";"

  16:          dic.Add strEmail, ""

  17:      End If

  18:  End If

  19:   

  20:  Next

  21:   

  22:  Debug.Print strEmails

  23:  End Sub

The above macro gets the email address of all selected emails (I did a search for the feedback email’s subject header first, then selected them all). The emails are nicely deduped, and written into the output (immediate) window separated by a semicolon. Now it is just a matter of taking that list and sending out the emails.