Reading intended recipient from Undeliverable emails via Interop for Outlook - interop

Question

I've created an application, which is used to loop through the emails in an inbox and find all the undeliverable, mailbox full or delayed emails and generate a report.
The usual routine is to loop through all the emails in the inbox (up to a specified date).
If an email is undeliverable use regex to find the email. This works 95% of the time as this information is contained in the body of the Undelivered message (ReportItem).
So, my problem is I have a few emails which are returning blank emails to the report making it nigh on impossible to clean them or easily report that we have a problem with someone's email.
I have found that the information in the Internet Headers has who the mail was intended for, but cannot find anything on if it is possible to use an interop or some other object to obtain this information.
If anyone else has come across this problem and knows of a work around I would be very grateful.
Cheers

Answer 1

I was looking to automate an outlook mail box to move all undelivered emails and store the email address of the recipient of the undeliverable message in a list, so that I can later check if an entry of the list is present in an excel column and then remove it from the excel. I hope this helps !
I've found a Python solution for this problem. A python library that is used to connect to the outlook is win32com, so first we import all libraries that we will need:
import win32com.client
import re
import datetime as dt
from tqdm import tqdm
import time
import extract_msg
This is a good way to connect to a specific outlook account, if you have :
outlook = win32com.client.Dispatch("Outlook.Application").GetNamespace("MAPI")
accounts= win32com.client.Dispatch("Outlook.Application").Session.Accounts
Then create a loop that iterates through the whole outlook and gets to the specified mail account:
for account in accounts:
inbox = outlook.Folders(account.DeliveryStore.DisplayName)
if account.DeliveryStore.DisplayName == 'place_your_account_name_here':
for folder in inbox.Folders:
Find the folder in outlook you wish to check by folder name,
so if you would want to iterate through Inbox, type "Inbox" instead of "Folder_name"
if folder.__str__() == "Folder_name":
messages = folder.Items
messages.Sort('[ReceivedTime]', True)
if folder.Folders.Item('Undeliverable'):
undeliverable = folder.Folders.Item('Undeliverable')
list_of_undelivered_email_addresses = my_super_function(messages,undeliverable)
After we have reached the mail items and declared the undeliverable subfolder as "undeliverable", we specify the time period for which we want to do the below function:
def my_super_function(messages,undeliverable):
list_of_undelivered_email_addresses = []
last_n_days = dt.datetime.now() - dt.timedelta(days = 25)
messages = messages.Restrict("[ReceivedTime] >= '" +last_n_days.strftime('%m/%d/%Y %H:%M %p')+"'")
rl= list()
I have found that the msot popular times of undeliverable email addresses present some sort of an error, and below the error is the original version of the email I have sent. Most of them (with very few exceptions, have a line that says:
To: "Some_email_address" ....
This is why I used this regular expression to get read the whole line after my pattern (which is "To: "")
pattern = re.compile('To: ".*\n?',re.MULTILINE)
for counter, message in enumerate(messages):
It is very important that you save the email somewhere on your PC, because otherwise as soon as you read it's body, the email gets encrypted.
message.SaveAs("undeliverable_emails.msg")
f = r'specify_the_absolute_path_where_you_want_it_saved'
try:
msg = extract_msg.Message(f)
print(counter)
Search the saved msg body for the keyword Undeliverable:
if msg.body.find("undeliverable")!= -1 or msg.body.find("Undeliverable")!= -1 or msg.subject.find("Undeliverable")!= -1 or msg.subject.find("undeliverable")!= -1 or msg.body.find("wasn't found at")!= -1:
Save the actual email to a list, so you can move it to the undeliverables subfolder later
rl.append(message)
m = re.search(pattern, msg.body)
m = m[0]
mail_final = m.split('"')[1]
list_of_undelivered_email_addresses.append(mail_final)
list_of_undelivered_email_addresses=list(filter(None, list_of_undelivered_email_addresses))
else:
print('this email is not an undeliverable one')
except:
pass
Move all mails in the list to the undeliverables folder:
if len(rl) ==0:
pass
else:
for m in tqdm(rl):
m.Move(undeliverable)
return list_of_undelivered_email_addresses
Here is the full code:
import win32com.client
import re
import datetime as dt
from tqdm import tqdm #tqdm gives you the progress bar
import time
import extract_msg
outlook = win32com.client.Dispatch("Outlook.Application").GetNamespace("MAPI")
accounts= win32com.client.Dispatch("Outlook.Application").Session.Accounts
def my_super_function(messages,undeliverable):
list_of_undelivered_email_addresses = []
last_n_days = dt.datetime.now() - dt.timedelta(days = 25)
messages = messages.Restrict("[ReceivedTime] >= '" +last_n_days.strftime('%m/%d/%Y %H:%M %p')+"'")
rl= list()
pattern = re.compile('To: ".*\n?',re.MULTILINE)
for counter, message in enumerate(messages):
message.SaveAs("undeliverable_emails.msg")
f = r'some_absolute_path'
try:
msg = extract_msg.Message(f)
print(counter)
if msg.body.find("undeliverable")!= -1 or msg.body.find("Undeliverable")!= -1 or msg.subject.find("Undeliverable")!= -1 or msg.subject.find("undeliverable")!= -1 or msg.body.find("wasn't found at")!= -1:
rl.append(message)
m = re.search(pattern, msg.body)
m = m[0]
mail_final = m.split('"')[1]
list_of_undelivered_email_addresses.append(mail_final)
list_of_undelivered_email_addresses=list(filter(None, list_of_undelivered_email_addresses))
else:
print('else')
except:
pass
if len(rl) ==0:
pass
else:
for m in tqdm(rl):
m.Move(undeliverable)
return list_of_undelivered_email_addresses
for account in accounts:
inbox = outlook.Folders(account.DeliveryStore.DisplayName)
if account.DeliveryStore.DisplayName == 'desired_email_address':
for folder in inbox.Folders:
if folder.__str__() == "Inbox":
messages = folder.Items
messages.Sort('[ReceivedTime]', True)
if folder.Folders.Item('Undeliverable'):
undeliverable = folder.Folders.Item('Undeliverable')
list_of_undelivered_email_addresses = my_super_function(messages,undeliverable)

Answer 2

looks like what I want isnt part of the ReportItem properties.
The possible options are Extended IMAPI, CDO or Redemption
http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Outlook/microsoft.public.outlook.program_vba/2004-11/0084.html