hi wayne

that's some good advice there. thanks very much. i've had a play with automating outlook from vfp and it works a treat. even does what i thought i wouldn;t be able to do and save copies in the sent folder.

at the moment i have created an exe and just call this vfp exe from clipper in DOS. seems to work ok like this. is there any reason i shouldn't do this and set up a polling vfp app instead. if i don;t have to constantly runa vfp app in the b/g then that's what i'd prefer.

thanks for you advice!