Using Microsoft Mail Internet Headers to group messages

[nitro]

Hi there,

I'm working on an application that automatically generates emails and sends
them to specified outlook accounts using WebDav. I need to figure a way of
grouping some of these automatically generated emails in the outlook client
based on criteria that I specify.

Essentially I'm trying to develop a correlation between a few emails so that
I can use the outlook "arrange by" view to group these emails.

I'm wondering if I could group emails in outlook using any Mail Internet
Headers such as Thread Index, Thread Topic, In-Reply-To etc. I can specify
create these headers before I send out the email, however, I'm not able to
find a way to make outlook group emails by these criteria.

Can someone please let me know if it's possible to group emails by Mail
Internet Headers. If not, is there any other way I can define a correlation
between emails so that outlook can understand that the messages are
correlated.

Thanks for the help in advance.

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

Internet headers cannot be used for what you want.

You need to pick some other property. I'd suggest that you use the user
interface to look at customizing views and custom Arrange By setups. That
will show you all the possibilities for grouping and arranging using views.
Then just pick one of the available properties not used for something else
or that's exclusive to your items as your key fields in the view.

 

[nitro]

Thanks for the reply Ken but it seems as though none of the options to
arrange messages work for me. I want to pass in a unique message ID generated
in my application and I want to use that to group messages. Is there any way
I can make this happen?

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

Since most properties that aren't default won't survive a trip over the
Internet you can use an x-header to transmit the property value but the
problem is how to use that header at the receiving end. Outlook won't sort
or group or filter on a header.

What I'd be doing would require non-form code that would use the Outlook
2007 object model or Redemption (www.dimastr.com/redemption) to read the
headers (not exposed to the object model in versions earlier than 2007) and
to set a property that Outlook can use to group with.