Email thread detection in an Outlook add-in?

Question

I'm designing an Outlook add-in and need to determine whether a selected message is part of a thread. Ideally, I'd also like to find related messages in said thread as well. Reading over the documentation, the conversationId property looks promising, though there doesn't seem to be a way to "get messages by conversationId."

Under the current version (1.4, non-preview) of the Outlook Add-in API, is it possible to detect that a message is part of a thread using the JavaScript API? Is it possible to then find other messages in the same thread?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:34

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ConversationId is part of the javascript API. This means that you can know the ConversationId for the Office.context.mailbox.item whose your add-in is focusing on. See documentation here
To my knowledge, there is no way to retrieve all mails for a given ConversationId using vanilla javascript and Office.js.

However, you may be interested in my answer here.

When something is not available with Office.js api for an Outlook Add-in you can try to use the Exchange Web Services (EWS) or REST APIs to perform the action

You have basically two ways to request EWS from a mail add-in.

You can request directly the EWS with a SOAP request from your client app. See method makeEwsRequestAsync in Office.context.mailbox(https://dev.outlook.com/reference/add-ins/Office.context.mailbox.html).

You can get an access token, send it to your server and make the request from there.

For the specific case of retrieving conversations using the Outlook REST API, this answer may also be helpful.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:34

Community

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answered Feb 13 '17 at 13:49

Benoit Patra

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The fact that conversationId is documented in the 1.4 API documentation (https://dev.outlook.com/reference/add-ins/Office.context.mailbox.item.html#conversationId) means that it's part of the JavaScript API, no? Seems odd for it not to be. +1 on the EWS suggestion; I think even if conversationId is what I think it is, I'd still have to leverage EWS to get the related messages. – nsturdivant Feb 13 '17 at 14:22
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Oh sorry I did not check the documentation on 1.4... my bad. I keep the answer because it may be useful for others. So what you are looking for is not retrieving the conversationID of a mail but all mail to this thread. You may be interested by this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/41125652/fetch-messages-filtered-by-conversationid-via-office365-api/41131045#41131045 – Benoit Patra Feb 13 '17 at 15:45
please update your answer to A. reflect that conversationId is part of the JavaScript API and that B. there is not (yet) a native JavaScript API hook for retrieving related messages, and I'll accept your answer. – nsturdivant Feb 13 '17 at 16:11

Email thread detection in an Outlook add-in?

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