Question

I recently posted a question about saving an email once it’s sent – I have just about everything working, except for one small detail. Basically, I am able to catch an email right before it sends, and do whatever I want with it – in my case, save it. However, if you try to access that email’s CreationTime attribute, it returns January 1st 4501 at 12AM. This is most likely because it hasn’t actually been ‘created’ yet, in that it will be created in the Sent items folder as soon as my code finishes executing and it actually sends.

I’d like to leave this MailItem, which is about to be sent, untouched. I would like to duplicate it, change the CreationTime attribute of the duplicate to DateTime.Now, then save the duplicate, then allow Outlook to continue sending the original. However, when I attempt to modify the CreationTime, I get an error that that attribute is read-only. Is there any way to ‘break into’ it? Or any way to force a write or something?

Answer 1

A better approach is attaching to the sent items Folder.ItemAdd so you can save messages after they have been sent instead of before – that way your MailItem.CreationTime should be accurate. This may or may not be an option for you but could alleviate the issue.

Outlook.Folder sentItems = ThisAddIn.Application.Session.GetDefaultFolder(Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderSentMail) as Outlook.Folder;
sentItems.Items.ItemAdd += new Outlook.ItemsEvents_ItemAddEventHandler(sentItems_ItemAdd);
// ...
void sentItems_ItemAdd(object Item)
{
  var msg = Item as Outlook.MailItem;
  msg.SaveAs(yourPath, Outlook.OlSaveAsType.olMSG);
}

Note: You need to handle proper COM resource disposal and error handling.