OWA 2010 Url parameter for filling in multiple recipients

Question

If already logged into Live, I can enter a url as follows:

https://xxxxx.outlook.com/owa/?ae=Item&a=New&t=IPM.Note&[email protected]

And it will open the Compose email with the To filled in. I need to send the email to multiple recipients. I tried:

https://xxxxx.outlook.com/owa/?ae=Item&a=New&t=IPM.Note&[email protected];[email protected]

and it doesn't work. It doesn't parse the 'to' correctly and treats it as one email address.

I tried different delimiters and spaces in the url with no luck. I found nothing that works for OWA 2010.

How to do this?

Answer 1

I believe I may have solved it.

You can use https://xxxxx.outlook.com/owa/?ae=Item&a=New&t=IPM.Note&to=RecipientAlias parameter at the end but realized you can not resolve the alias with the domain, e.g. [email protected] which auto resolves the address.

If you use the recipients alias, it fails to resolve at first, however it allows the user to resolve manually on clicking send. It is a good workaround if you are only sending internally, but becomes a problem when using external contacts. I believe this is the best workaround I am going to get as I am using internal addresses.

I guess to workaround the external recipient issue is to create an external contact in Active Directory which is messy but in my head it works. Not tried it but I hope it helps someone.

Answer 2

OWA 2010 has a parameter called "email" that takes as an argument a fully URL-encoded mailto: string. It wants comma separated email addresses, though. Short answer for you is

https://xxxxx.outlook.com/owa/?ae=Item&a=New&t=IPM.Note&email=mailto:[email protected],[email protected] https://xxxxx.outlook.com/owa/?ae=Item&a=New&t=IPM.Note&email=mailto:joe%40joe.com,dave%40joe.com

This can be extended to fill in any item (To, CC, BCC, Subject, Body). To make OWA 2010 take any arbitrary mailto: command, take the entire mailto: string ("mailto:blah......blah..........blah"), pass it through urlencode(), and then add it to the end of this "https://xxxxx.outlook.com/owa/?ae=Item&a=New&t=IPM.Note&email=". Note that this means the URL encoded items inside of the mailto: command will get URL encoded again. In the example above, the mailto: string doesn't have any ampersands or question marks so we can get away without having to encode the @ into %40, etc. If you login via the form interface, and you try to use the above links without encoding the @, you will get some sort of login failure. Best to always encode everything.

Unrelated comment: If you have Outlook 2010 on your machine and set as your default mail handler, it will handle normal mailto: commands, except that email addresses must be semi-colon separated. This appears to violate RFC 2368.