Problems appending email pdfs to existing portfolios using Outlook plugin.

Question

I'm trying to use the outlook pdfmaker plugin that comes with Acrobat X Pro to append Outlook 2010 emails to an existing portfolio.  I'm getting this error: "PDFMaker cannot append to the selected Adobe PDF archive because it was not created in Outlook PDFMaker."  Surely there must be some way to store emails with the rest of the files in an existing portfolio created without the plugin.  Otherwise this is a showstopper.  The whole point of a portfolio is to collect all of the files for a project in one place!  I don't want to have one portfolio containing all the emails and another portfolio containing all of the rest of the files.  That would be dumb.
I thought that I could achieve a paperless office by scanning snail mail and other files to pdf and collecting them in correspondence portfolios on my hardrive.  My plan was to append emails to the previously-created correspondence portfolios as the emails are received.  I can't believe I can't do this!

Answer 1

The problem stems from the order in which you are performing the tasks.  The Portfolios that are created by Outlook and Lotus notes collect specific metadata that corresponds to the particular email format.  These fields do not exist in Portfolios created by simply combining files into a Portfolio in Acrobat, and can't be created after the fact.  So that's the cause.  You can think of it them as "email Portfolios" and "regular Portfolios." 
As far as a solution, since you don't appear to be relying on those metadata fields, anyway, the most expedient workaround would be to go ahead and convert your Outlook 2010 email to a temporary Portfolio, then drag the individual files outside of the Portfolio to a temporary location.  Then, open your existing Portfolio, which doesn't contain the metadata fields, and drag your Outlook email from the temporary location into the Portfolio.  Problem solved.  The appearance of the PDF-converted email remains unchanged, and the files are now in the single location you were ultimately after.
For more sophisticated manipulation of PDF-converted email Portfolios, including attachments, you could look into a third party plug-in from Evermap called AutoPortfolio.  It possesses some very powerful, flexible functionality in that regard.
Disclosure:  I have no affiliation of any kind with Evermap, but did address the use of several of their products in my book, "The PDF Litigation Guide."    
Hope that helps!
Jason Covey
PDF Litigation Solutions, LLC
www.pdflitigationguide.com