Move unread, unflagged emails from inbox to inbox once every Friday

Question

My goal is to move all emails that are unread and not flagged from inbox to the inbox folder of a local .pst see the attached. I have not been able to figure out when to start.

I could not find a case where this has been doe before. AI-generated code could not compile, and I sadly am not familiar with using .vba in outlook.

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Answer 1

There are several tasks that must be completed for that. The very first one is to find the required items that correspond to the specified search criteria. To get that part done you need to use the Find/FindNext or Restrict methods of the Items class. Read more about these methods in the articles that I wrote more than a decade ago for the technical blog:

• How To: Use Find and FindNext methods to retrieve Outlook mail items from a folder (C#, VB.NET)
• How To: Use Restrict method to retrieve Outlook mail items from a folder

But if you need to process multiple folders at once you would better consider the AdvancedSearch method of the Outlook Application class. The key benefits of using the AdvancedSearch method in Outlook are:

• The search is performed in another thread. You don’t need to run another thread manually since the AdvancedSearch method runs it automatically in the background.
• Possibility to search for any item types: mail, appointment, calendar, notes etc. in any location, i.e. beyond the scope of a certain folder. The Restrict and Find/FindNext methods can be applied to a particular Items collection (see the Items property of the Folder class in Outlook).
• Full support for DASL queries (custom properties can be used for searching too). To improve the search performance, Instant Search keywords can be used if Instant Search is enabled for the store (see the IsInstantSearchEnabled property of the Store class).
• You can stop the search process at any moment using the Stop method of the Search class.

See Advanced search in Outlook programmatically: C#, VB.NET for more information.

The next thing is to move found items to the required folder. The Move method moves a Microsoft Outlook item to a new folder. For example:

Sub MoveItems() 
 Dim myNameSpace As Outlook.NameSpace 
 Dim myInbox As Outlook.Folder 
 Dim myDestFolder As Outlook.Folder 
 Dim myItems As Outlook.Items 
 Dim myItem As Object 
 
 Set myNameSpace = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI") 
 Set myInbox = myNameSpace.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox) 
 Set myItems = myInbox.Items 
 Set myDestFolder = myInbox.Folders("Personal Mail") 
 Set myItem = myItems.Find("[UnRead] = true") 
 While TypeName(myItem) <> "Nothing" 
   myItem.Move myDestFolder 
   Set myItem = myItems.FindNext 
 Wend 
End Sub

But in your scenario you need to get a folder from another store/account:

Sub EnumerateStores() 
 
 Dim colStores As Outlook.Stores 
 Dim oStore As Outlook.Store 
 Dim oRoot As Outlook.Folder 
 
 On Error Resume Next 
 
 Set colStores = Application.Session.Stores 
 
 For Each oStore In colStores  
   Set oRoot = oStore.GetRootFolder  
   Debug.Print (oRoot.FolderPath)  
 Next 
 
End Sub