Odd Behavior from Resend Message Code

July 15, 2008 – 3:33 pm by JP

If you have been using the code I wrote that duplicates the “Resend This Message” functionality, you may have run into a small problem when executing the code repeatedly on subsequent messages.

Resend This Message

For example, you might execute the code on Message #1 in order to resend it to the same recipients. That creates Message #1a in your Sent Items folder.

But instead of selecting Message #1 again when you want to resend it (again), you might select Message #1a, because chronologically it’s listed before Message #1 (if you sort items by Sent Date/Time). Then you end up with Message #1aa, which is a copy of Message #1a. Resending that message creates Message #1aaa, and so on. In other words, each message subsequently becomes a child of a child message, not a child of the parent message.

If you keep doing this, eventually the messages become unreadable by the recipient. It seems like resending a copy of a copy of a copy is something Outlook can’t handle (after a certain point).

Also you might notice if someone does reply to one of the messages you’ve resent repeatedly, the “To:” field will be filled in with the recipient name, like someone typed your name over and over into the “To:” field. It seems to relate to the fact that you’ve resent the copy repeatedly.

To cure this, you can use the code to resend only parent messages (which will require scrolling through your Sent Items to locate the original copy), or, if you do resend child messages, you must periodically create a new message in order to ‘reset’ the odd Outlook behavior I described above.

HTH,
JP

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