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I work in an environment where some people are using Microsoft Exchange and some people are not. The meeting invitations sent out by Exchange include a text/calendar attachment with the meeting information in iCal format. They also include an empty text/plain and an empty text/html part.

Is there any way to configure Exchange such that it will populate either (or both!) the text/plain or the text/html part with a human-readable version of the meeting summary? This would help out people using mail clients that do not have native support for text/calendar attachments.

larsks
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    What a novel concept, catering to those of us who may be reading email on a terminal. +1 for "Can we make Microsoft play nice with others?" sentiment. – voretaq7 Apr 10 '12 at 16:53
  • Dude. I wonder if there's a way to ante in on a bounty for this bad boy. See how far up we can drive a bounty if a bunch of people can pitch in. =) – Magellan Apr 10 '12 at 18:23
  • I do not believe what you're asking for is possible. – Tatas Apr 10 '12 at 18:56
  • What (major) version of Exchange? What actual clients are people running? If the Exchange folks are running Outlook, it might be possible to write a client-side mod to cause/fix the extra attachment. It might be possible to write something deeper that handles it for the entire Exchange server but that would be pretty involved. – Mark Allen Apr 20 '12 at 00:32
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    Actually, I'd like to see a general answer to this one. – Magellan May 17 '12 at 16:01
  • Try this: from Outlook 2010 (also available in older versions from different menues), open a contact you want to send invitations in text only. Right click on the email address, this will show you a contact card with some options. Select the 4th icon from the left (a drop down box) then select the option Outlook Properties. In the Internet Format option select Text Only. – Danilo Brambilla May 21 '12 at 11:05
  • The problem with this...if I understand your comment...is that it is a *client side* solution, and is configured per contact. That's not really going to solve things in an organization with upwards of 500 employees. I was looking for a server-side solution. – larsks May 21 '12 at 15:06
  • I see. This setting is also available on server side, but is per user too (so you have to set it for each user that wants to receive plain text emails only). Email will be converted to plain text regardless of the sender format (all emails). You can find it in the contact properties in EMC, mailbox feature, select the desired protocol (MAPI, POP3...) and click on properties button. I admit I haven't tryied this before, hope it helps. – Danilo Brambilla May 22 '12 at 09:40

1 Answers1

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Yes, you can do this, but the first way I am suggesting may be a crude hack.

Add transport rules that parse the meeting summary and add it to a disclaimer (temporarily), then use this same disclaimer as an addition to each message. As Exchange will add the disclaimer with a matching format, you can output it in an HTML and text friendly manner simultaneously via use of or other similar tags. HTML is not unreadable either.

An alternative way may be to create a mailbox that receives ALL meeting invites and then replies to a specific number of clients on the to/cc/etc with a text version of the same if they match a list of text-preferential users.

Brennan
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  • this. Native exchange doesn't have any in-built support for changing outgoing messages. third-party (proprietary) tools exist, but with native exchange all you can do is append a disclaimer – acolyte May 24 '12 at 13:11