Copyright © 2002-2004 Kim Gräsman
A couple of weeks ago, I caught myself doing the following more than once in the same day:
The first time was OK, but the second time I found this incredibly tedious, so I immediately saw the need for an Outlook add-in for browsing to the sender's web site.
BrowseToSender is an Outlook COM add-in with very little magic inside. It does more or less exactly what I used to do manually, so don't be surprised if you end up at www.yahoo.com, www.hotmail.com or www.usa.net more often than not.
BrowseToSender installs itself as a toolbar in Outlook, as shown below
Being subscribed to a gazillion mailing lists, I noticed recently that I also like to reply to people off-list, so I implemented a little button for that as well in version 1.3. Note that Reply to sender automatically prepends the subject line with OFFLIST: — this can be overridden by adding a string value in the registry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Winwonk\BrowseToSender called ReplyPrefix (.reg script here). If you leave the value blank, BrowseToSender will not prefix your subject lines.
I recently had some feedback asking for keyboard shortcuts, and I've missed that myself for so long, I couldn't resist adding it. BrowseToSender defaults to Ctrl+Alt+B for Browse and Ctrl+Alt+R for Reply, but you can change the keyboard shortcuts in the registry, in the same location as ReplyPrefix. Be careful, though, the support for keyboard combos is pretty rudimentary and keyboard shortcuts you add here will hide corresponding Outlook combos. If you find you need to use some key I don't support (Ctrl, Alt, Shift, Esc, Space, A-Z, 0-9), let me know.
First off, this doesn't work in Outlook Express, which is based on a completely separate codebase, and has no add-in model that I know of. BrowseToSender is intended for the Outlook shipped as part of the Office package.
It looks like I've finally managed to find a good way of retrieving the sender's e-mail address. Theoretically, it should work on any Windows and/or Outlook version, but I'm fully prepared it won't work on yours. Please send me a note if this is the case.
So far, BrowseToSender has been tested and seen working on the following configurations:
| OS version | Outlook version | Service configuration |
| Windows 2000 | Outlook 2000 | Microsoft Exchange |
| Windows 2000 | Outlook XP | IMAP |
| Windows XP | Outlook 2000 | Microsoft Exchange |
| Windows XP | Outlook XP | Microsoft Exchange |
| Windows XP | Outlook XP | POP3 |
| Windows XP | Outlook 2003 | IMAP |
Please note that BrowseToSender is somewhat crippled with Exchange — the e-mail address reported by Outlook is not always the Internet address, but rather the internal Active Directory DN. This is only an issue for e-mail from people within your organization, where BrowseToSender is of limited use anyway. For proper Internet e-mail, the address is properly reported, and BrowseToSender works fine.
2004-05-20
2004-02-03
2003-06-02
2003-03-07
If you ever wonder what Outlook is up to, OutlookSpy is the greatest tool!
First public release
Download the setup file below, and start it. It will copy one COM dll to your machine, and register it as a COM add-in.
If you've already got an earlier version of BrowseToSender installed, I recommend that you uninstall it before attempting to install v. 1.4. This is necessary for the startup code to create the toolbar correctly.