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toddt -> How to supercharge your PBEM experience with Outlook (10/10/2004 7:30:51 AM)
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Hi all--
Imagine you are in a PBEM game, and your opponent has finished his turn. He clicks SEND on his automailer and heads to the fridge.
You are working on your project at your computer, getting burned out and bored. Suddenly, your game magically pops open, and the new turn has already been automatically copied into your email game directory, and deleted from your mail box to avoid cluttering it up. You click load game, and booyah, you are back into the action in 5 seconds.
Quickly, you finish with your turn, you hit exit and send, your mail goes out, your game is closed down. Neat and tidy. You can just keep working till the next time your game activates. Firewalls? Who cares? They will never stop YOUR games... :) This is true grognard heaven.
Don't have time at the moment? Just minimize, and keep working. You'll get to it...and you know your opponent has the same setup, and will definitely know when you are finished.
My wife and I have a lot of fun with PBEM in KP.
We use Outlook techniques to streamline the process, and I thought I might share our experience. It's not that difficult.
Creating an Outlook Rule:
For this to work you need to do two things:
1) Somehow copy the attatchment to your opponents email into the EmailSave dir.
2) Somehow get outlook to delete the mail when it's done doing that.
3) Somehow get outlook to kick off your game.
Luckily, there is, of course, a way to do each of these. (or only one or two of them, if you like)
a) Goto www.download.com and grab EZDetatch---install it.
EZDetatch is a "custom rule" which allows you to manage attachments.
b) When it's installed, open outlook.
tools -> rules wizard
check messages when they arrive -> next
<checkmark> with specific words in the subject. (notice that the word 'subject' is a link in the lower box--click it)
Pick a word. I use 'korsun' for KP. add -> ok. (In KP, you'll set up the email filename to be Korsun--the subject will match.)
->next
<checkmark> delete it (don't worry, it won't delete the email till last).
<checkmark> perform a custom action. (click on the custom action link in the lower box)
Now a dialog for the custom action comes up. Click in the listbox and select EZDetatch. Here's where the magic happens. Click change.
The EZDetatch menu comes up. It wants to know what dir you want the attatchment in. Hit browse, and browse to your emailPlay dir.
Go to the bottom, and <checkmark> remove attachment from original email. (if you like).
<checkmark> excecute and browse to your game's excecutable, korsun.exe, for example. Hit OK on the form.
->next -> finish -> ok!
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