Outlook VSTO attach meta data

Question

I am writing an Outlook addin that inserts content into an email, and I have a emailSent event that I would like send an event back to my server letting me know some content was shared.

Is there a way to attach some meta information to the email (or the word doc, which is what you are creating in outlook) so that I can grab that meta info so I can send it back to my server.

Right now, the only way I think I can do it is to search through the email on the send event looking for my content with regex and pull out the info i need, but that seems cumbersome, and also means I need to run the regex for every email sent, even when they haven't added my content.

Answer 1

There is the concept of MAPI user properties, which you can add to an Outlook item. Since Office 2007 the object model allows access to them. If your add-in must run also with older Outlook version, you should recurr to use Redemption (which I prefer also for higher office versions because it has more flexibility, albeit a greater footprint in distribution).

See UserProperties Interface on MSDN.