OL97: Outlook Voting and Vote Processing

ID: Q166446

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Outlook 97

SUMMARY

With Microsoft Outlook 97, you can send survey-type messages, with voting buttons, to a group of recipients. By clicking a button, each respondent can express their preference and generate a response message to vote. Outlook logs Vote messages to the original message's Tracking page.

For the Voting feature to work, both the message sender and the message recipient must be using Outlook. It also depends upon the setting of certain options in Outlook, and the proper handling of the incoming Vote messages. This article describes the conditions and requirements for proper operation of Outlook's Voting feature.

MORE INFORMATION

How to Generate Voting Messages

1. On the Inbox Compose menu, click New Mail Message.

2. On the new message, click the Options tab.

3. In the General options section click, "Use voting buttons."

4. In the option window, select one of the predefined option sets or type

   in your own set of options, separating each by a semi-colon (;). Each
   of these options items will be the title of a voting button on the
   message received by the recipient.

5. Click the Message tab and complete the survey message.

6. Click Send.

Processing Vote Response Messages

Outlook either manually or automatically logs the incoming Vote messages to the original message (in the Sent Items folder) on its Tracking page.

1. Manual logging of Vote messages:

   Opening or deleting a Vote message logs it to the Tracking page.
   However, deletion of the Vote message by an Inbox rule will not log
   the message.

2. Automatic logging of Vote messages:

   The following conditions are required for automatic processing of Vote
   messages:

    a. The sent message must remain in the default Sent Items folder.
 
    b. The Vote message must remain in the default Inbox.

    c. There must be 30 to 60 seconds of idle time on your computer before
       the automatic processing will activate. Any keyboard or mouse
       movement will interrupt this idle time.

    d. You must select the following automatic processing options:

        - On the Tools menu, click Options.

        - On the E-mail tab click, "Process requests and responses on
          arrival, and Delete receipts and blank responses after processing."

       These options automatically log votes to the sent message's Tracking
       page, then delete them if they have no text entered by the respondent.

REFERENCES

For more information on message tracking, please see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

   ARTICLE-ID:  Q160934
   TITLE     :  OL97: How to Sort and Print Tracking Information.

Additional query words:

Keywords          : GnlFrmt GnlFilem 
Version           : WINDOWS:97
Platform          : WINDOWS
Issue type        : kbhowto

Last Reviewed: December 16, 1998