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&to=joe@joe.com

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&to=joe@joe.com;dave@joe.com

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

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:joe@joe.com,dave@joe.com 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.

Answer 2

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. to=recipient@domain.com 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.