Outlook MailItem: How to distinguish whether mail is incoming or outgoing?

Question

Hi, I am writing VSTO Outlook addin in C#, and I need to distinguish, whether given MailItem is incoming or outgoing (or neither, when it is for example a draft).

Is there some foolproof way to do this? Best solution I have now would be getting a list of recipients, cc's, and bcc's, loading email adresses from active accounts, and checking if those two lists intersect, but this seems quite fragile to me, and I hope that there is a better solution.

Use case: I'd like to get a relevant date for an email, which could be either ReceivedTime, or SentOn, but to know which one I should use, I beed to know whether a mail was sent or received.

Thank you for ideas :)

Answer 1

Take a look at the MailItem's .Parent property - examine the folder properties to determine if it is the inbox, outbox, drafts, sent items, etc.

Answer 2

Did you try MailItem.Sent property?

Its true for incoming, and false for outgoing.

Answer 3

I came here with the same problem. Since I will explicitly suggest that user moves the mail to some folder in my usecase, checking Parent would not help...

Regarding MailItem.Sent: are you sure that MailItem.Sent works this way? I just wrote a simple code to run through both my Inbox and SentItems and for almost all of them Sent is true. I assume this is really just an indication whether the mail has been sent (= is not draft)...

Answer 4

MailItem.sent is true for incoming too.

How about checking MailItem.ReceivedByEntryID. But i am sure this will fail (ReceivedByEntryID will be null for mails in inbox) if you say import from outlook express or maybe some other email program

Iterating thru mail accounts/senderemail may help as you said, but its not fool proof (like if you rename the email address)

Answer 5

You can check if it's inside the Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderInbox or olFolderOutbox, then there should be other methods you can use to check if it's inside either of these folders!

Outlook.Application _application = new Outlook.Application();
Outlook.MAPIFolder folder = _application.GetNamespace("MAPI").GetDefaultFolder(Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderInbox);