Extract text string from undeliverable email body to Excel - excel

Question

I am trying to extract the email address from each individual undeliverables email body.
The email body would be like:
----------------------------Email----------------------------
Delivery has failed to these recipients or groups:
XXXX#XXXXXX.XXX (XXXX#XXXXXX.XXX)
...no need info...
To: XXXX#XXXXXX.XXX
...no need info...
----------------------------Email-----------------------------
I came up with below code:
Sub Test()
Dim myFolder As MAPIFolder
Dim Item As Outlook.MailItem 'MailItem
Dim xlApp As Object 'Excel.Application
Dim xlWB As Object 'Excel.Workbook
Dim xlSheet As Object 'Excel.Worksheet
Dim Lines() As String
Dim i As Integer, x As Integer, P As Integer
Dim myItem As Variant
Dim subjectOfEmail As String
Dim bodyOfEmail As String
'Try access to excel
On Error Resume Next
Set xlApp = GetObject(, "Excel.Application")
If xlApp Is Nothing Then
Set xlApp = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
xlApp.Application.Visible = True
If xlApp Is Nothing Then
MsgBox "Excel is not accessable"
Exit Sub
End If
End If
On Error GoTo 0
'Add a new workbook
Set xlWB = xlApp.Workbooks.Add
xlApp.Application.Visible = True
Set xlSheet = xlWB.ActiveSheet
Set myFolder = GetNamespace("MAPI").GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox)
For Each myItem In myFolder.Items
subjectOfEmail = myItem.Subject
bodyOfEmail = myItem.Body
'Search for Undeliverable email
If bodyOfEmail Like "*Delivery*" & "*failed*" And indexOfEmail Like "*Undeliverable*" Then
x = x + 1
'Extract email address from email body
Lines = Split(myItem.Body, vbCrLf)
For i = 0 To UBound(Lines)
P = InStr(1, Lines(i), "#", vbTextCompare)
Q = InStr(1, Lines(i), "(", vbTextCompare)
If P > 0 Then
xlApp.Range("A" & x) = Trim$(Mid$(Lines(i), 1, Q - 1)) 'extract the email address
Exit For
End If
Next
End If
Next
End Sub
It worked on my test Email Inbox, which opened an Excel sheet and listed every particular email address within the target emails.
When I ran this code on my work email account, it didn't give me a thing. I found that it had trouble reading "Undeliverables" emails, and every time after I ran it, one of the undeliverables emails turned into Traditional Chinese characters which cannot be read.
格浴㹬格慥㹤਍洼瑥⁡瑨灴攭畱癩∽潃瑮湥⵴祔数•潣瑮湥㵴琢硥⽴瑨汭※档牡敳㵴獵愭捳楩㸢⼼敨摡㰾潢祤ാ㰊㹰戼㰾潦瑮挠汯牯∽〣〰㘰∶猠穩㵥㌢•慦散∽牁慩≬䐾汥癩牥⁹慨⁳慦汩摥琠桴獥⁥敲楣楰湥獴漠⁲牧畯獰㰺是湯㹴⼼㹢⼼㹰਍昼湯⁴潣潬
I feel this code works on only forwarded undeliverable email, in my test email inbox.
It never read from the original undeliverable emails and turned those emails to Chinese characters one by one.
I googled it, it seems there are bugs in Outlook for the failed delivery emails. How to fix this?

Answer 1

After frustrated several days, I finally came up a much simpler solution, which doesn't need to worry about any restriction of NDR in Outlook or even never use VBA at all...
What I did is:
Select all the non-delivery emails in Outlook
Save as a ".txt" file
Open Excel, open the txt file and select "Delimited" and select "Tab" as delimiter in the "Text Import Wizard"
filter out the column A with "To:", then will get all the email address on column B
Can't believe this is much simpler than VBA...
Thank you guys for your help! Just can't really deal with the "Outlook NDR turning to unreadable characters" bug with so many restrictions on a work station, think this might be helpful!

Answer 2

For getting addresses... I can pull the address from the action.reply which creates an outlook message with a body and sender:
Sub Addressess_GET_for_all_selected()
Dim objSel As Selection
Dim i As Integer
Dim objMail As MailItem
Dim objRept As ReportItem
Dim oa As Recipient
Dim strStr As String
Dim objAct As Action
Set objSel = Outlook.ActiveExplorer.Selection
Dim colAddrs As New Collection
On Error GoTo 0
frmProgress.SetMax (objSel.Count)
'On Error Resume Next 'GoTo Set_Domains_Mail_Collection_ERR
On Error GoTo SkipObj: ''for unhandled types
For i = 1 To objSel.Count
Set objMail = Nothing
If objSel(i).Class = olReport Then ''report email addresses 2020-02-12
Set objRept = Nothing
Set objRept = objSel(i)
For Each objAct In objRept.Actions
If objAct.Name = "Reply" Then
Set objMail = objAct.Execute
Exit For
End If
Next objAct
End If
''fire on objmail or if is omail
If objSel(i).Class = olMail Then
Set objMail = objSel(i)
End If
If Not objMail Is Nothing Then
DoEvents
For Each oa In objMail.Recipients
colAddrs.Add GetSMTPAddress(oa.Address)
Next oa
On Error Resume Next '<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
colAddrs.Add GetSMTPAddress(objMail.sender.Address)
On Error GoTo 0 '<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
objMail.Delete
End If
SkipObj:
frmProgress.SetCurrent (i)
Next i
SortDedupCollection_PUSH colAddrs
frmProgress.Hide
End Sub
And GET SMTP:
Private Function GetSMTPAddress(ByVal strAddress As String) As String
' As supplied by Vikas Verma ... see
' http://blogs.msdn.com/vikas/archive/2007/10/24/oom-getting-primary-smtp-address-from-x400-x500-sip-ccmail-etc.aspx
Dim olApp As Object
Dim oCon As Object
Dim strKey As String
Dim oRec As Recipient ' Object
Dim strRet As String
Dim fldr As Object
'IF OUTLOOK VERSION IS >= 2007 THEN USES NATIVE OOM PROPERTIES AND METHODS
On Error Resume Next
If InStr(1, strAddress, "#", vbTextCompare) <> 0 Then
GetSMTPAddress = strAddress
Exit Function
End If
Set olApp = Application
Set fldr = olApp.GetNamespace("MAPI").GetDefaultFolder(10).Folders.Item("Random")
If fldr Is Nothing Then
olApp.GetNamespace("MAPI").GetDefaultFolder(10).Folders.Add "Random"
Set fldr = olApp.GetNamespace("MAPI").GetDefaultFolder(10).Folders.Item("Random")
End If
On Error GoTo 0
If CInt(Left(olApp.VERSION, 2)) >= 12 Then
Set oRec = olApp.Session.CreateRecipient(strAddress)
If oRec.Resolve Then
On Error Resume Next
strRet = oRec.AddressEntry.GetExchangeUser.PrimarySmtpAddress
If strRet = "" Then
strRet = Split(oRec.AddressEntry.Name, "(")(2) ''at least provide name.
strRet = Left(strRet, InStr(1, strRet, ")") - 1)
End If
On Error GoTo 0
End If
End If
If Not strRet = "" Then GoTo ReturnValue
'IF OUTLOOK VERSION IS < 2007 THEN USES LITTLE HACK
'How it works
'============
'1) It will create a new contact item
'2) Set it's email address to the value passed by you, it could be X500,X400 or any type of email address stored in the AD
'3) We will assign a random key to this contact item and save it in its Fullname to search it later
'4) Next we will save it to local contacts folder
'5) Outlook will try to resolve the email address & make AD call if required else take the Primary SMTP address from its cache and append it to Display name
'6) The display name will be something like this " ( email.address#server.com )"
'7) Now we need to parse the Display name and delete the contact from contacts folder
'8) Once the contact is deleted it will go to Deleted Items folder, after searching the contact using the unique random key generated in step 3
'9) We then need to delete it from Deleted Items folder as well, to clean all the traces
Set oCon = fldr.items.Add(2)
oCon.Email1Address = strAddress
strKey = "_" & Replace(Rnd * 100000 & Format(Now, "DDMMYYYYHmmss"), ".", "")
oCon.FullName = strKey
oCon.Save
strRet = Trim(Replace(Replace(Replace(oCon.Email1DisplayName, "(", ""), ")", ""), strKey, ""))
oCon.Delete
Set oCon = Nothing
Set oCon = olApp.Session.GetDefaultFolder(3).items.Find("[Subject]=" & strKey)
If Not oCon Is Nothing Then oCon.Delete
ReturnValue:
GetSMTPAddress = strRet
End Function

Answer 3

sI have been having exactly the same issue. All of the NDR messages I am dealing with are of the class "REPORT.IPM.Note.NDR" and the method I found for obtaining the original recipient was pieced together from a number of these sorts of posts and questions that I've been trawling through!
I am using the PropertyAccessor.GetProperty method against the ReportItem to obtain the PR_DISPLAY_TO property value from the header information of the ReportItem.
In VBA, I am using the MAPI namepace and looping through the olItems collection of a given folder containing the report messages. I'm running this from Access as my database front-end is built that way, but I would imagine you can probably run it from within Outlook VBA (but don't hold me to that).
Dim olApp As Outlook.Application
Dim OlMapi As Outlook.NameSpace
Dim olFolder As Outlook.MAPIFolder
Dim olMail As Outlook.ReportItem
Dim OlItems As Outlook.Items
Set olApp = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
Set OlMapi = olApp.GetNamespace("MAPI")
Set olFolder = OlMapi.Folders("SMTP-ADDRESS-FOR-YOUR-MAILBOX").Folders("Inbox").Folders("NAME-OF-SUBFOLDER_CONTAINING-NDR-REPORTS")
Set OlItems = olFolder.Items
If OlItem.Count > 0 Then
For Each olMail In OlItems
strEmail = olMail.PropertyAccessor.GetProperty("http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x0E04001E")
'DO WITH strEmail AS REQUIRED
DoEvents
Next
End If
The returned value from that MAPI property could be a semicolon delimited list where there are multiple recipients, so you could check for ';' in the returned string and then split into an array and iterate through to get each individual address, but in my case, there is only ever one recipient so I didn't need to over complicate it. It also may be a display name when the original recipient is a contact, so this may be a shortcoming for some, but again in my case, that's not a factor.
This is just a snippet of a bigger function so you will need to amend and integrate it to your needs, and obviously replace or amend the placeholders for the mailbox and subfolder values.
The intention is currently to also extract the NDR reason code so that I can automate removal of email addresses from our database where the reason is because the mailbox does not exist, so referring only to ReportItem object - This likely won't work for NDR emails which are not of that type, as I would image thoe MAPI properties are not available, however I have found in practice that all of the NDR messages come back like this as we are using Exchange Online.

Answer 4

I Did some tweaking to the original code in the first post,
and added a helper function to Extract Email From String, and seems to be working fine.
Sub List_Undeliverable_Email_To_Excel()
Dim myFolder As MAPIFolder
Dim Item As Outlook.MailItem 'MailItem
Dim xlApp As Object 'Excel.Application
Dim xlWB As Object 'Excel.Workbook
Dim xlSheet As Object 'Excel.Worksheet
Dim Lines() As String
Dim i As Integer, x As Integer, P As Integer
Dim myItem As Variant
Dim subjectOfEmail As String
Dim bodyOfEmail As String
'Try access to excel
On Error Resume Next
Set xlApp = GetObject(, "Excel.Application")
If xlApp Is Nothing Then
Set xlApp = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
xlApp.Application.Visible = True
If xlApp Is Nothing Then
MsgBox "Excel is not accessable"
Exit Sub
End If
End If
On Error GoTo 0
'Add a new workbook
Set xlWB = xlApp.Workbooks.Add
xlApp.Application.Visible = True
Set xlSheet = xlWB.ActiveSheet
Set myFolder = GetNamespace("MAPI").GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox).Folders("Real Estate").Folders("ag#joinreal.com")
For Each myItem In myFolder.Items
subjectOfEmail = myItem.Subject
bodyOfEmail = myItem.Body
'Search for Undeliverable email
If subjectOfEmail Like "*Undeliverable*" Or subjectOfEmail Like "*Undelivered*" Or subjectOfEmail Like "*Failure*" And subjectOfEmail Like "*Delivery*" Then 'bodyOfEmail Like "*Deliver*" And
x = x + 1
'Extract email address from email body
Lines = Split(bodyOfEmail, vbCrLf)
For i = 0 To UBound(Lines)
P = InStr(1, Lines(i), "#", vbTextCompare)
If P > 0 Then
EmailAdd = ExtractEmailFromString(Lines(i), True)
Debug.Print x & " " & EmailAdd
xlApp.Range("A" & x) = EmailAdd
Exit For
End If
Next
End If
Next
End Sub
Function ExtractEmailFromString(extractStr As String, Optional OnlyFirst As Boolean) As String
Dim CharList As String
On Error Resume Next
CheckStr = "[A-Za-z0-9._-]"
OutStr = ""
Index = 1
Do While True
Index1 = VBA.InStr(Index, extractStr, "#")
getStr = ""
If Index1 > 0 Then
For P = Index1 - 1 To 1 Step -1
If Mid(extractStr, P, 1) Like CheckStr Then
getStr = Mid(extractStr, P, 1) & getStr
Else
Exit For
End If
Next
getStr = getStr & "#"
For P = Index1 + 1 To Len(extractStr)
If Mid(extractStr, P, 1) Like CheckStr Then
getStr = getStr & Mid(extractStr, P, 1)
Else
Exit For
End If
Next
Index = Index1 + 1
If OutStr = "" Then
OutStr = getStr
If OnlyFirst = True Then GoTo E
Else
OutStr = OutStr & Chr(10) & getStr
End If
Else
Exit Do
End If
Loop
E:
ExtractEmailFromString = OutStr
End Function

Answer 5

There is a problem with the ReportItem.Body property in the Outlook Object Model (present in Outlook 2013 and 2016) - you can see it in OutlookSpy (I am its author): select an NDR message, click Item button, select the Body property - it will be garbled. Worse than that, once the report item is touched with OOM, Outlook will display the same junk in the preview pane.
The report text is stored in various MAPI recipient properties (click IMessage button in OutlookSpy and go to the GetRecipientTable tab). The problem is the ReportItem object does not expose the Recipients collection. The workaround is to either use Extended MAPI (C++ or Delphi) or Redemption (I am its author - any language) - its RDOReportItem.ReportText property does not have this problem:
set oItem = Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection(1)
set oSession = CreateObject("Redemption.RDOSession")
oSession.MAPIOBJECT = Application.Session.MAPIOBJECT
set rItem = oSession.GetRDOObjectFromOutlookObject(oItem)
MsgBox rItem.ReportText
You can also use RDOReportItem.Recipients collection to extract various NDR properties from the recipient table.