We recently had a customer who was copying messages around using CopyTo . They found that for certain messages, if the target message store was a PST, they’d get MAPI_E_NO_ACCESS (0x80070005). They saw this for the same messages every time, when other messages would copy to the same PST just fine. When I debugged the failure, I found the root of the problem was that the source message had an attachment with the property 0x67100003 set on it. The PST provider does not allow this property to be set

In Outlook, custom forms are typically published to a forms library so that only one copy of a form is stored on your computer. Individual items contain a Message Class field that indicates which form to use to display the data that is contained in the item. When you publish custom forms to a forms library, Microsoft Exchange Server-based computers and Outlook use considerably less resources and bandwidth because the form itself does not need to be stored within each individual item. Considerations

It used to be that if you wanted to track a message through various Object Model events such as NewInspector and ItemSend , one way to do it was to grab PR_SEARCH_KEY . A customer recently discovered that this doesn’t always work after applying a recent hotfix. Before applying the hotfix, PR_SEARCH_KEY would remain unchanged during the various events. After applying the hotfix, if they were in cached mode they would see the search key change during the send event, but only if the user saved the message,

Angela’s put together a good set of guidelines for developing for Outlook 2010 , particularly as it relates to whether your code is built for 32 bit or 64 bit (what we’re calling Bitness). To summarize, all MAPI or Outlook Object Model based apps and non-managed add-ins will need to be built in both 32 and 64 bit flavors to support both target environments, managed add-ins can be built as Any CPU , and VB 6 based add-ins and apps need to be scrapped and rewritten entirely. Read the full article to

Not many people are aware of the feature, but MFCMAPI implements a MAPI Form Viewer . This means MFCMAPI can use MAPI to ask Outlook to display messages. You might have run into this if you ever double-click on a message in MFCMAPI. If you’re on a machine with Outlook installed, the message will open up like it does when you double-click it in Outlook. And if Outlook isn’t installed and you’re using Exchange’s MAPI, you get a scary dialog saying we couldn’t open the MAPI form manager . This is one

As Paul Thurrott notes, we just announced that we’re documenting the PST file structure . I haven’t decided yet if I’ll be writing a standalone parser/viewer/validator, but I’m sure I’ll be adding some interesting stuff to MFCMAPI . I’ll let you know when I know more. digg_url = "http://blogs.msdn.com/stephen_griffin/archive/2009/10/26/inside-the-pst.aspx";digg_title = "Inside the PST";digg_bgcolor = "#FFFFFF";digg_skin = "compact"; digg_url = undefined;digg_title = undefined;digg_bgcolor = undefined;digg_skin

I have been working lately with this customer who was trying to create new signature files under %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Signatures folder which will be used by Outlook 2007 (SP2) but what we discovered is that whenever they try to use it, it used to crash Outlook. This was the content of the HTML Signature file that we were using. < HTML > < BODY > < IMG SRC ="http://www.server.com/logo.jpg" /> </ BODY > </ HTML > .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small;

Ryan has a new post up about changes we’re making to Outlook 2010 to make shutdown faster . These changes are building on the previous changes we made introducing Fast Shutdown. Two key takeaways: MAPI Providers now get Fast Shutdown by default. They may still opt out of Fast Shutdown by implementing IMAPIClientShutdown . Outlook 2010 will not call the OnBeginShutdown or OnDisconnection of addins during shutdown. Ryan gives plenty of best practices for rewriting your addins to deal with these changes

I am not talking about some Friday night dinner or the latest buff around the corner. I am talking about the “Include” tab on Outlook 2007’s Ribbon UI. Recently I got this case where customer developed a custom email form but he was not able to use the “Include” tab to add attachments to the email, as you can see from the following screenshot. All the buttons were grayed-out, but why? Customer had no clue, well that’s why he called Microsoft, isn’t it? I tried to reproduce it locally, but first I

A while back, Jason posted an Account Management API sample. I’ve threatened promised before that I would post an update to this sample, and I finally got around to it. You can download the updated sample here . In addition to adding a –W command to call DisplayAccountList and show the Account Settings Wizard, I’ve also added a couple new properties that dev have decided to document: #define PROP_ACCT_USER_EMAIL_ADDR PROP_TAG(PT_UNICODE, 0x000C) #define PROP_MAPI_IDENTITY_ENTRYID PROP_TAG(PT_BINARY,