Flag mail items from a manager for follow-up

This example shows how to flag email items that were received from the user’s manager for follow-up.

Example

Microsoft Outlook provides a task flagging system in which certain Outlook items such as mail items or contact items can be flagged for follow-up. When you flag an Outlook item for follow-up, information about that Outlook item, along with other task-based information, is displayed on the To-Do Bar and Calendar navigation module in the Outlook user interface. The To-Do Bar is displayed as a vertical pane in a typical configuration of the Outlook explorer window. It contains a date navigator control, upcoming appointments, and items that have been flagged for follow-up. The To-Do Bar itself is not extensible, and you can set configuration options for the To-Do Bar only through the Outlook user interface. Flagging items allows to you organize and prioritize tasks and to-do items.

The following code example marks a group of items for a specified follow-up interval. The example gets all items in the current user’s Inbox that are from the current user’s manager by using a DAV Searching and Locating (DASL) query to filter for messages of type “IPM.NOTE” with the manager’s name as the sender. It then flags all items according to the OlImportance value of the Importance property. All high-importance items are flagged for follow-up today and all normal-importance items are flagged for follow-up this week by using the MarkAsTask(OlMarkInterval) method.

If you use Visual Studio to test this code example, you must first add a reference to the Microsoft Outlook 15.0 Object Library component and specify the Outlook variable when you import the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook namespace. The using statement must not occur directly before the functions in the code example but must be added before the public Class declaration. The following line of code shows how to do the import and assignment in C#.

using Outlook = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook;

private void DemoTaskFlagging()
{
    const string PR_SENT_REPRESENTING_NAME =
        "http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x0042001E";
    const string PR_MESSAGE_CLASS =
        "http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x001A001E";
    Outlook.AddressEntry currentUser =
        Application.Session.CurrentUser.AddressEntry;
    if (currentUser.Type == "EX")
    {
        Outlook.ExchangeUser manager;
        try
        {
            manager = currentUser.
                GetExchangeUser().GetExchangeUserManager();
        }
        catch
        {
            Debug.WriteLine("Could not obtain user's manager.");
            return;
        }
        if (manager != null)
        {
            string displayName = manager.Name;
            string filter = "@SQL=" + "\""
                + PR_SENT_REPRESENTING_NAME + "\""
                + " = '" + displayName + "'" + " AND " + "\""
                + PR_MESSAGE_CLASS + "\"" + " = 'IPM.NOTE'";
            Outlook.Items items =
                Application.Session.GetDefaultFolder(
                Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderInbox).
                Items.Restrict(filter);
            foreach (Outlook.MailItem mail in items)
            {
                if (mail.Importance ==
                    Outlook.OlImportance.olImportanceHigh)
                {
                    mail.MarkAsTask(Outlook.OlMarkInterval.olMarkToday);
                    mail.Save();
                }
                if (mail.Importance ==
                    Outlook.OlImportance.olImportanceNormal)
                {
                    mail.MarkAsTask(Outlook.OlMarkInterval.olMarkThisWeek);
                    mail.Save();
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

See also

• Tasks