Determining forwarded and replied to email messages in Microsoft Graph API

Question

I'm building a .NET Core WEB API that serves as an automation layer over Outlook messages and calendars using the Microsoft Graph SDK. One of the requirements is to identify which messages have been replied to or have been forwarded.

It's not yet clear to me how I can determine whether an email message has been forwarded or replied to when using the results of Graph Explorer "My Mail" sample request.

This answer states that the ConversationId property remains the same (which is indeed the case) and that the only indication is either "FW:" or "RE:" prefixed to the subject. Also in the Message documentation I can't seem to find a proper, reliable way of identifying those.

Can anyone tell me how this can be done?

Glen Scales · Accepted Answer · 2020-02-03 23:25:24Z

4

If your looking at mail in the Inbox and you want to know if they have been acted on by a Mail client (eg Oultook or OWA) then you could use PidTagLastVerbExecuted https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/client-developer/outlook/mapi/pidtaglastverbexecuted-canonical-property (this is how outlook determines it) eg

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/messages?$expand=SingleValueExtendedProperties($filter=(Id%20eq%20'Integer%200x1081'))

If a Message had been replied to you would see a result like

            "singleValueExtendedProperties": [
            {
                "id": "Integer 0x1081",
                "value": "102"
            }
           ]

This still isn't 100% reliable so if your doing this for Auditing the only way is using the Tracking Logs (MessageTrace in Office365)

answered Feb 3, 2020 at 23:25

Glen Scales

22.3k1 gold badge23 silver badges24 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

J. Michiels Over a year ago

Thank you Glen! It won't be used for auditing, just need to pass a true/false value from my API to give the frontend an indicator whether or not to show a forwarded / replied arrow icon. So this will do nicely :) The only thing that looks a bit strange here, is that 102 is used for replies and 104 for forwarded messages. While the docs link respectively states 105 and 106.

Glen Scales Over a year ago

I think the documentation is wrong, last time I used this I used github.com/stephenegriffin/MAPIStubLibrary/blob/master/include/… to get the verb enums.

Marc LaFleur · Accepted Answer · 2020-02-03 21:08:22Z

1

Email, in general, has very weak support for message threading. That said, you might be able to pull this from the internetMessageHeaders collection.

Per RFC5322:

The In-Reply-To: and References: fields are used when creating a reply to a message. They hold the message identifier of the original message and the message identifiers of other messages (for example, in the case of a reply to a message that was itself a reply). The In-Reply-To: field may be used to identify the message (or messages) to which the new message is a reply, while the References: field may be used to identify a "thread" of conversation.

Note that In-Reply-To is an optional field so it may not always be populated.

answered Feb 3, 2020 at 21:08

Marc LaFleur

33.4k4 gold badges41 silver badges71 bronze badges

1 Comment

J. Michiels Over a year ago

Thanks for the reply Marc, I've checked this out and it provided me with some useful tracking and auditing information. But sadly the In-Reply-To and References fields were not there. So I assume Outlook does not populate them.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Determining forwarded and replied to email messages in Microsoft Graph API

2 Answers 2

2 Comments

1 Comment

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

2 Comments

1 Comment

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related