Question

This question is very similar to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6839516/outlook-2010-reopen-messages which was closed as not being a question.

I have a bad habit of keeping emails open in Outlook 2010 as a reminder of what needs to be done during the day since I am constantly interrupted. What I would like to do is use PowerShell to get a list of the open emails so that if I need to close Outlook I know what I was working on before.

I am not worried about Outlook crashing, Outlook normally reopens all of the emails I had been working on automatically; the use case I am dealing with is when I have to manually close Outlook for a patch or to address some other issue.

What I would like to do is query the running Outlook process and see what messages are open; opening a new Outlook process via COM won’t work since it would have a different list of open messages.

Does anyone know of a way to do this in PowerShell? I can use another language if needed, but have been attempting to standardize on PowerShell where possible so that other people here can reuse any code I write.

One possibility I have considered is to launch Outlook via PowerShell so that I have a way to interact with the running process.

Answer 1

First of all, you need to get a reference to the running Outlook instance.

$outlook = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::GetActiveObject('Outlook.Application')

Using the application object you then

• Iterate through the outlook.Inspectors collection
• Ask each individual Inspector for its CurrentItem
• Store whatever properties you need from this item (date? subject? entry id?)