getting mail source in Outlook 2007 add-in

Question

Hi,

I'm writing an add-in that would do some processing on the body of the received emails. Since emails are often replies to previous emails I need first to remove the content of previous emails.

And here lies the problem... If I use the MailItem.Body string I get the content that was processed by Outlook and doesn't contain any '>' characters that usually indicate the previous content. I can use regular expressions and look for content such as "On X, Y wrote" to find where the previous email begins but this doesn't always work nicely. It fails, for example, when you receive an email where the content was written between the lines of the previous email.

Therefore my question is: Is it possible in Outlook to somehow get the actual source of the email message. By source I mean the content which you see if you press in Thunderbird View->Message Source. This content contains tags like "Delivered-To:", "Return-Path:", ... and also the mail body in unprocessed version (with ">" chars).

Thank you in advance for any help, Gregor

Answer 1

I have similar requirements about identifying emails which have been forwarded or replied too. If the message is internal it will have a message ID and a list of reference IDs. That is all found in the Header data of the message.

Check out this article:

Using Visual Studio 2008 / VSTO / Outlook to Pull Out RFC 822 Header Data

and create the VSTO pane in question. View the incoming messages to see if it has what you are looking for... HTH