Trying to automate extraction of emails from MS Outlook 2016 on OS X High Sierra. I’ve been fiddling with both Applescript and Automator and getting very mixed results. I’ll go through each of these separately.
First, I tried Automator, and there are some packaged actions available there, and the one that was most interesting for my purposes was to “Get selected items from Outlook”. Ok, fair enough. But that means that you have to manually select the items in the UI before the action returns any results. Not ideal, and not what I want.
Automator has another packaged action “Save Outlook items as Files”, (which is ultimately what I want to do with the “selected items”) and that works great. Unfortunately this forces me into the position of manually selecting items from the GUI.
So I turned to Applescript and got a basic Outlook folder iterator working nicely. But when I iterate through the messages in a particular folder and try to invoke the “save” operation on a message, via the script, I’m getting an error that seems to indicate that Outlook doesn’t really know what “save” means in the context of saving a message.
Anyone have any suggestions for how to get this fully automated, so all I have to do is enter the name of an Outlook folder and get the messages saved as files?
FYI, I’m doing an NLP project using my email messages as a corpus, in case you want to know why I’m going through this exercise.