I spent a lot of time today trying to make a public Exchange folder work as a sales support tool. It looked like an easy task but I severely underestimated how much time it would take. The plan was to customize two Outlook forms to prefill the bcc field and the return address. I wanted to set up the groundwork to do a better job of tracking the sales lead sources. Creating the custom forms was easy. The problem was that I needed to modify the message class field so that I could use the new forms. I found a script that could change inbound messages to the new message class. Exchange 5.5 uses something called an agent to run the script. Exchange 2000 uses something different, a sink event. For such a simple and old problem the documentation for Exchange 2000 was hard to find. Then I realized that this wouldn't work for me since I receive the sales emails in my personal inbox and move them over to the public folder. The script would change only the inbound messages and not the existing messages. I finally found a Word document from Microsoft that runs a macro that changes all of the items in a folder to the same message class. My plan is to: categorize the sales email, run a rule to move it to the public folder, and then run the Word macro to change the message class. It is cludgy but it works. It would be nice if this was all automatic but that can wait for another day. The hard part is done.