Just picked up this tip that you’d think would be common knowledge, but it isn’t.  And it’s pretty cool.

Say you’re having issues with Outlook – it’s not connecting or is intermittent.  What do you do?  We all know we can click the Outlook icon in the task tray, but have you tried holding down the CTRL key while doing the same?  You get two new items in the context menu:

Notice them?  Connection Status… and Test E-mail AutoConfiguration…

The first menu item brings up a dialog that provides a listing of all the server connections Outlook is maintaining for you and the status of various activities:

Test Email AutoConfiguration brings up a really handy utility for validating your connection to Exchange Server (or any other POP3/SMTP server for that matter):

All this troubleshooting magic is courtesy of the CTRL key.  Who knew?

Update:  I fired up Fiddler and used its built-in TextWizard to play with the link subject string to see the effects of encoding/decoding on the bytestream -- basically, I confirmed that the mangling of the “è” is due to URL decoding of the un-encoded special character.  So, Outlook is definitely doing a URL decode for the subject line.

Update 2:  You may notice that my example link above to reproduce the problem I described doesn't mangle the subject line;  seems that .Text went and converted the “è” to an HTML escape sequence (& # 232).  Trust me, the problem persists!

So, I've been farmed out to one of our satellite teams who are busily working away at knocking off some pre-launch bugs in a SharePoint solution we developed for an enterprise client.  The dev lead approached me today with a request to look into a very odd little bug that has had them stumped for a little while.

They have a ASP.NET (1.1) page that contains an anchor tag with a mailto: link that contains a subject heading that is bi-lingual (French and English):

Request Access/Demander d'accès

Problem:  When the user clicks said link and triggers Outlook to launch a mail window (using Word as the editor), the “è” becomes mangled:

Request Access/Demander d'accès

Assuming you have Outlook or Outlook Express installed, you can try this out below:

Un-encoded bilingual link.

I spoke with a team member who had tried to tackle this by leveraging HttpUtility.UrlEncode to try and apply a wide assortment of character encodings to the link text (which was being supplied from a resource assembly) without any luck.  They were unable to address the issue server-side and so were beginning to look at Outlook and elsewhere for solutions.

On a whim, I tried hand-encoding the “è” with the URL equivalent “%E8“, and 'lo!  It worked!  It seems that Outlook is mis-coding the character from the web page to the mail window -- my guess is that it's getting lost in translation between UTF-8 and Unicode somehow.  Try this link:

Encoded bilingual link.

In the final analysis, this is a cheap-fix and we still need to determine why when UrlEncode is used, that the link doesn't work.  Use this knowledge for good and not evil!