shahine.com/omar/

So, with Visual Studio 2005 now RTM’ed it was time to get my hands dirty. I haven’t written any code in a few months, and that’s sad. I’ve also never played with Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 which now contains a wonderful new Outlook Add-in model. At long last, much of the heavy lifting of creating an Outlook Add-in is nicely abstracted away (as it should be).

Anyhow, this was a great excuse to finally build something I’ve wanted Outlook to do forever. A lot of the time I will get added to a e-mail thread by some one else. I have no desire to be on this thread, nor do I have any intention of continuing to delete e-mails as they trickle in for hours, or days! So, I built Thread Killer. It’s a very simple addin consisting of a button in Outlook called Kill Thread and a subfolder of the inbox. When you select an email and press Kill Thread I add the conversation index of the email to a blacklist (managed using the new ApplicationSettings feature). Then I process all the message in the current folder and move any instance of that conversation to the same folder.

Thread Killer also listens for all new mail that you receive and checks to see if we have blacklisted that ConversationIndex and if we have, then we move it to the Thread Killer folder.

Future versions may allow you to move items to the deleted items folder (I feel safer quarantining them for now). I’ll also think of adding some heuristics so that if some one mentions your name in a reply (indicating that you may need to actually see the email) that email isn’t filed away.

I’ll be placing this on toolbox soon for MS folks, and eventually I’ll release it.

BTW, Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 ROCKS! So does Edit and Continue! Unbelievable.

update: I finally posted ThreadKiller. Howevever, the version in ClearContext v3 is a bit more reliable IMHO .