With this information in the email headers, it is fairly safe to assume they will reach the recipient of the email message. Microsoft Email applications will interpret the Reply-By as an additional info to the X-Message-Flag. The optionally added reminder date will be transmitted in a Reply-By email header as mentioned in section 2.1.51 of RFS 4021. Headers starting with X- are application defined headers and it’s up to each individual email client to decide how to interpret them, if at all. This header’s value is the type of flag like “Follow up” or “Review”. But I have hardly seen any other value than “Follow-up” ever being used, so I will continue to use the term “Follow-up-Flag”.)Īs it is often the case, the Outlook documentation is lacking detail in regard to specifying in which exact scenarios these options will work.įollow-Up-Flag itself is translated to an X-Message-Flag email header.

Basically it is just a flag and can have multiple different values other than “Follow up”, like “Review”, “Do not forward”, “Reply” “For your information” and several others. Side note: I refer to this Flag as the Follow-Up-Flag, which is not entirely correct. So the reminder is essentially a different thing than the Follow-Up-Flag. If you closely examine this screenshot, it should become obvious that it is possible so set the Follow-Up with or without the reminder. To do this, click the Add Reminder item from the Follow-Up dropdown in the email windows ribbon.

Either for yourself or for the recipient of an Email. It is easy to add a reminder manually to an Outlook email. The general functioning of Flags and Reminders for Email Obviously, this whole question rang with me and I invested some time to come up with a possible solution to this. On the other hand, if someone I hardly know sent me an email with an attached reminder, I would be seriously annoyed. I use Outlook intensively to manage my tasks and frequently I add a follow-up-flag and a reminder to emails in by inbox to make sure I act upon them within due time if required.Ī predefined follow-up-reminder already set by the sender of an email would indeed be helpful to not miss any important task. He asked whether it is possible to use VBA in Access to automatically send an email with an attached reminder for the recipient. This week I received an interesting inquiry from a reader of the Access & Email section on my website. How to send Outlook Emails with attached Flag and Reminder in VBAīy Philipp Stiefel, originally published June 10th, 2017

Visual basic for outlook 2016