How to add another person’s mailbox to Outlook 2007

If you regularly need to access another person’s Exchange mailbox you can do so in Outlook quite easily by going to the File menu | Open | Other User’s Folder… However, this becomes quite tiresome because it does not show in the list of Mail Folders in Outlook.

Adding Mailbox to Outlook 2007

If you would like for the mailbox to show up in the Mail Folder list then do the following.

1. Open Outlook 2007
2. Open Tools menu | Account Settings…| Data Files
3. Select your Exchange mailbox.
4. Click the Settings… button.
5. Click the Advanced tab.
6. Click the Add… button
7. Type in the name of the mailbox in the textbox
8. Click OK to close out open windows and that should do it.

Owner Permissions

The above should work, but the owner of the mailbox may not have granted you the rights to the mailbox. To grant you permissions the owner of the mailbox just need to:

1. Open Outlook 2007
2. Right-click on the mailbox you need access to.
3. Select the Properties for “<name of mailbox here>”
4. Click the Permissions tab.
5. Click the Add… button
6. Locate your user in the directory add them. Change the permissions as desired.
7. Click OK to close out open windows and that should do it.

NOTE: The permissions may need to be set on each folder including Deleted Items or any folders the owner has created.

Replying or Sending on Behalf of the owner

In order for you to reply to any messages that are received in this mailbox or compose new emails from this mailbox you need to be added as a delegate for that person. Please note, if you create a new message or click the reply button in Outlook the Message window will act as you would normally see. However, when you actually click send the Exchange server will send back a message saying you don’t have the rights. Specifically, it will say something like

“You are not allowed to send this message because you are trying to send on behalf of another sender without permission to do so. Please verify that you are sending on behalf of the correct sender, or ask your system administrator to help you get the required permissions.”

To fix this, the owner needs to add you as a delegate. To do that, the owner needs to:

1. Open Outlook 2007
2. Go to Tools menu | Options… | Delegates tab
3. Click the Add… button
4. Find you in the list.
5. The owner will now be presented with a bunch of options. The default settings are to allow access to the Calendar. They can leave it, or select the appropriate level of access such as None (if you don’t need access to the calendar) for the Calendar. In order to get access to the mailbox (Inbox), they need to change the Inbox drop down list to Editor (can read, create, and modify items).
6. Click OK buttons.

More Info

For more instructions and background info on this topic, just type additional mailbox into the help box in Outlook 2007. Open the one called Manage another person's mail and calendar items. The help document is quite good and cover everything in depth.

What type of objects are in your Outlook Inbox?

I personally find programming against Outlook from .Net (C# in my case) a bit of trial and error. I recently found out that it is not good to assume that any type of folder only has a particular kind of items in it. In particular, I found out that Undeliverable messages are not of type MailItem, they are of type ReportItem. Go figure! The clue for me was that the icon for these messages in Outlook are different than a normal email message.

Below is a snippet of code that will loop through all the items in your inbox and try to cast it to all the types I could find, and prints out some interesting information about the item. If someone knows of other types, please let me know. If an item is of an unknown type it will write that line with “ERROR: Unknown Item at Index:” message.

There are obviously lots of ways you could write this, but this code was my first thought, and it allows me to actually see the exception if one occurs.

// Create an Outlook Application object. 
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application outLookApp = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application();

// Print all emails. 
NameSpace outlookNS = outLookApp.GetNamespace("MAPI");
MAPIFolder theEmails = outlookNS.GetDefaultFolder(OlDefaultFolders.olFolderInbox);

for (int i = 1; i <= theEmails.Items.Count; i++)
{
    object obj = theEmails.Items[i];
  
    // **********************
    try
    {
        AppointmentItem item = (AppointmentItem)obj;
        WriteLine(item.Subject);
    }
    catch (System.Exception ex1)
    {
        // **********************
        try
        {
            ContactItem item = (ContactItem)obj;
            WriteLine(item.FirstName);
        }
        catch (System.Exception ex2)
        {
            // **********************
            try
            {
                DistListItem item = (DistListItem)obj;
                WriteLine(item.Subject);
            }
            catch (System.Exception ex3)
            {
                // **********************
                try
                {
                    JournalItem item = (JournalItem)obj;
                    WriteLine(item.Subject);
                }
                catch (System.Exception ex4)
                {
                    // **********************
                    try
                    {
                        MailItem item = (MailItem)obj;
                        WriteLine(item.Subject);
                    }
                    catch (System.Exception ex5)
                    {
                        // **********************
                        try
                        {
                            NoteItem item = (NoteItem)obj;
                            WriteLine(item.Subject);
                        }
                        catch (System.Exception ex6)
                        {
                            // **********************
                            try
                            {
                                PostItem item = (PostItem)obj;
                                WriteLine(item.Subject);
                            }
                            catch (System.Exception ex7)
                            {
                                // **********************
                                try
                                {
                                    TaskItem item = (TaskItem)obj;
                                    WriteLine(item.Subject);
                                }
                                catch (System.Exception ex8)
                                {
                                    // **********************
                                    try
                                    {
                                        ReportItem item = (ReportItem)obj;
                                        WriteLine(item.Subject);
                                    }
                                    catch (System.Exception ex9)
                                    {
                                        WriteLine(string.Format("ERROR: Unknown Item at Index: {0}", i));
                                    }
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }

    }

}

A good starting point is: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa289167(VS.71).aspx#ol03cs_topic11

Also see: http://www.outlook-code.com

Cannot open this item. You cannot use SharePoint. Your system administrator has turned off the feature.

So you are using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and you get the following message:

Cannot open this item. You cannot use SharePoint. Your system administrator has turned off the feature.

Before I get to how to fix it, here are some of the ways you may encounter this message:

• Any Task list | Actions toolbar item | Connect to Outlook
• Receive an alert (from task, list, calendar, file, etc) in Outlook and try to open it.

What does this message mean, you ask? First, let me say that it doesn't necessary mean that your administrator has turned off the feature. For example, if you are trying to open an alert / notification sent from SharePoint notifying you that a list, task, file, etc has changed and you get this message it could be a bug with Exchange. Here is the link that describes the issue.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/930807/en-us

On the other hand, it could very well be exactly what the message says. To tell if this functionality truly been disabled by your administrator as the message indicates, the easiest thing is to check the registry.

To check the registry, do the following:

1. Start menu | Run... | regedit.exe
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Options\WSS\Disable
3. If the value for Disabled is 1 then the feature is indeed disabled by your administrator. If the value is 0 then it is not disabled and I would consider it to be a bug. If you don't have 12.0 in the path above then you likely don't have Outlook 2007 and are using another version of Outlook. In that case check out the following blog
   
   http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2007/01/27/enabling-and-disabling-sharepoint-integration-in-outlook-2007.aspx.
   
   Though from what I can tell the path for Outlook 2007 is incorrect. You can always try what I specified above and the one that is noted in that blog.

You can directly edit the registry and this will work for a while. Please note, you will likely need to restart Outlook 2007 for the change to take affect. The problem is that if you are in a larger organization or one that uses Group Policies to manage such things your changes will be overwritten the next time the Group Policies are applied to your computer. You may need to contact your adminstrator to determine why they disabled this functionality in the first place and ask if they can change the policy. Good luck ;)

Can't access Account Settings in Outlook 2007

If you are using Outlook 2007 and have some controlling system administrators they may have locked you out of Account Settings in Outlook 2007. You will know they have locked you out because you will get a message like the following when you go to Outlook 2007 | Tools | Account Settings. This feature has been disabled by your system administrator. For more information, contact your system administrator. This is unfortunate because this is an easy place to add RSS Feeds, etc. To temporarily (until the next Group Policy refresh most likely) enable your access again there is a very easy registry change you can do. In fact, you can put the registry change in a file and just double click it to make the change. Once the change is applied you should be able to open up Outlook 2007 and go to Tools | Account Settings. The registry key you need to change is the following:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Setup\ModifyAccounts

You need to set it to 0 to enable access, and 1 to block access.

If you want to be able to just double-click a file to make the change do the following.

1. Open notepad
2. Copy and paste the following into notepad Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Setup] "ModifyAccounts"=dword:00000000
3. Save file with a .reg file extension. For example: unlockOutlook.reg

Keep in mind this is a group policy so you will likely need to make the change (or double-click the file you created) each time you want to access the Account Settings. For more great Outlook hacks check out: http://wiki.yobi.be/wiki/Outlook#All_in_one_registry_file