Smart Alerts not working in Classic Outlook, but New Outlook and Outlook on the web

[rbsdc]

I have an outlook addin with TypeScript. Previously, we used the Event/ItemSend Api for our on-message-send-feature. It worked fine. Now we switched to Smart Alerts. The Smart Alerts both work correctly in the New Outlook and Outlook on the Web. However, in Classic Outlook it does not work. We always get the "[Addin] is unavailable and can't process your email at this time."-dialog.

We tried to debug but did not succeed attaching the debugger. The debug message shows when opening the taskpanes of the addin (the taskpanes work fine). However, the debug message does not show when clicking on "Send."

Furthermore:

• The event.js, which contains the OnMessageSend handler, is requested by Outlook. That is, the error happens after the event.js is loaded or while it is loading?
• Replacing the EventType (SoftBlock vs. PromptUser) has no effect.
• Each change was tested with a restart of the build process, dev server, Outlook, etc. to rule out possible caching issues.

Your Environment

Microsoft® Outlook® for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2511 Build 16.0.19426.20218) 64-bit)
Windows 10

Expected behavior

Smart Alerts, when working, should work as well in the New Outlook as well as the Classic Outlook.

Provide additional details

I also checked other issue, e.g. #6073 or #6073 but this did not help.

[github-actions]

Here are some similar issues that might help you. Please check if they can solve your problem.

• Configuring Outlook add-in so Smart Alerts are working on all platforms including Outlook Classic on Windows #6073
• Handle OnAppointmentSend events in the Classic Outlook add-in with Smart Alerts. Set SendMode to softblock. If the add-in is unavailable, the item cannot be sent. #5676
• Outlook: Unable to use smart alerts on locally hosted add-in #3677

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Possible solution (Extracted from existing issue, might be incorrect; please verify carefully)

Solution 1:

Usually that error indicates that Outlook Classic could not download the .js file from your webserver. In your manifest the url for the JS is:

https://localhost:3000/commands.js

Does that file Exist? If it does, does it get downloaded to the cache?

it will be in a folder (or similar) . The GUIDs and encoding will have different values on your machine.

C:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Wef\{79A24F6F-C404-4062-83C8-7EF1F5BDE719}\AkdbHrg8zpN9Dbs4k6biHA==\bbca517c-48a6-4f63-bf7d-fac9edd1fa4a_ADAL\Javascript

Reference:

• Configuring Outlook add-in so Smart Alerts are working on all platforms including Outlook Classic on Windows #6073 (comment)

Solution 2:

It is likely that something is causing the download not to work and that is the source of the problem.

The following has information about manifest and how we cannot download things with a "no-cache" header.

From the documentation:
All image URIs, such as those used for , must support caching in production. The server hosting the image shouldn’t return a Cache-Control header specifying no-cache, no-store, or similar options in the HTTP response. However, when you’re developing the add-in and making changes to image files, the caching can prevent you from seeing your changes, so using Cache-Control headers is advisable in development.

Reference:

• Configuring Outlook add-in so Smart Alerts are working on all platforms including Outlook Classic on Windows #6073 (comment)

Solution 3:

The difference between the task pane and the launch events cases is how the code is executed. The task pane uses WebView2 while the launch events use a js runtime that is a bit leaner. The js runtime doesn’t support all the more modern syntax that WebView2 does.

When you import the classification.js file the runtime has to parse that file to get the part that you are interested in and that file includes syntax that isn’t supported in the js runtime and so the loading fails, and the event handlers can’t run. While I can’t remember off the top of my head what all syntax isn’t supported, I am fairly certain that the arrow function '=>' you are using in your foreach calls in that file is not supported (I’ve encountered this problem myself). You’ll have to switch that to a regular function expression (i.e. '() => {}' becomes 'function () {}')

Reference:

• Outlook: Unable to use smart alerts on locally hosted add-in #3677 (comment)

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[nbaliga18]

Thanks for reporting this.

We’re routing this to the runtime team for further investigation into enabling local-network-access for Outlook add-ins.

Assigned to: @slabereemsft
CC: @emsabour @davidchesnut