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,

From time to time, I get asked to explain where CDO publishes Free Busy information in the Public Folder store, so I figured I’d put this article together. The basic process CDO uses for updating FB information is outlined in the More Information section of KB 278954 . We’re concerned with the part of the process summarized as “queued up to be sent to the site’s Free/Busy public folder.” The first thing CDO does is to open the Public Folder store and read a couple properties off of it, PR_FREE_BUSY_FOR_LOCAL_SITE_ENTRYID

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

Dave has a post up about the fate of the System Attendant Mailbox in Exchange 2010 . Since this mailbox isn’t there anymore in 2010, if you have a solution that depended on it, you’ll need to rework it. Dave gives a few suggestions, such as creating your own mailbox/account (the best option since you can then control your exact permission set) or using the System Mailbox . Enjoy! digg_url = "http://blogs.msdn.com/stephen_griffin/archive/2009/10/09/so-long-system-attendant-mailbox.aspx";digg_title

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

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,

Let’s take a look at the function OpenStreamOnFile , which is exported by MAPI. Suppose you want to use this function to open a stream on a file that has a Unicode file name. As has been noted before, this doesn’t work. Why is this? According to the documentation, and according to the header, maputil.h, this function takes two parameters, lpszFileName and lpszPrefix, which are of type LPCTSTR. However, it is impossible for an exported function to take a parameter of this type. Why? Because LPCTSTR

We had a customer recently who was asking how to tell a PST had been configured as a Sharepoint PST, so they could exclude it from some processing they were doing. After some digging, I found the property that Outlook itself uses to determine a PST is a Sharepoint PST, and development gave me permission to document it: #define PR_ASSOCIATED_SHARING_PROVIDER PROP_TAG(PT_CLSID, 0x0EA0) To check if a PST is a Sharepoint PST, mount the PST using OpenMsgStore , then call GetProps on the message store

The Outlook 2010 MAPI Reference has been updated. I don’t have a list of everything that changed, so I’ll highlight one addition that’s pretty cool: the property definition stream . Long time readers might remember I mentioned this property before – it’s one of the properties you want to delete to kill a one-off form . It’s also the property that Outlook uses to store information about named properties created via the Object model and the user interface. Now that the format of PidLidPropertyDefinitionStream