Print original email when it is undelivered

Question

I'm using MS Office 2016 Desktop App on Windows 10.

I didn't find any success searching online and also contacting MS Outlook Support to find that there is no easy way to achieve it except VBA script.

We send individual mail having an attachment, to a huge bulk of people. (I'm fine with this.)

I want when an email is not sent successfully (because of incorrect email address or other reason), to perform some action on the original email (not the undeliverable mail notice).

Possible action could be printing the mail and its attachments to some other email.

I want this as it is burdensome to print individual emails from around 1000s of emails daily.

MS Outlook rules don't provide the condition for 'when email undelivered' or similar. Can this be achieved with VBA script?

Answer 1

In theory - yes. Firstly, you need to make sure you get the actual NDR and the object type is ReportItem. That shouldn't be a problem if you are sending through Exchange, but if you are sending through POP3/SMTP account or if the NDR is delivered as a regular plain text message from the target server rather than your own Exchange Server, all bets are off.

The various report properties are stored in the recipient table of the NDR items. Unfortunately, ReportItem in OOM does not expose the Recipients collection like it does for MailItem. You can get NDR information from the Body property, but unfortunately OOM has a bug (left unfixed for a few years now) that causes ReportItem,Body to return meaningless garbled text. See Extract text string from undeliverable email body to Excel.

In most cases, you would be able to extract the message id of the original message (that caused in the NDR) from the PR_TRANSPORT_MESSAGE_HEADERS property (take a look at an NDR with OutlookSpy - I am its author - click IMessage button). You can access that property using ReportItem.PropertyAccessor.GetProperty("http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x007D001F"). You can then try to extract the In-Reply-To MIME header and use it to search for the original message in the Sent Items folder using Items.Find on the PR_INTERNET_MESSAGE_ID property (DASL name http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x1035001F). And here lies another problem - it is possible that the item in the Sent Items folder will not have that property: it is set automatically by Exchange, but the item in teh Sent Items folder in the cached store might not have it because most likely the item in never synchronized (this is due to bandwidth optimization trick by Outlook), so you might have to open the folder in the online mode using the MAPI_NO_CACHE flag, which OOM won't let you use - it is either Extended MAPI (C++ or Delphi) or Redemption (I am also its author - any language). See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45952523/what-is-the-vba-property-for-server-folder-contains-x-itmes for an example.