Nothing is exposed to help you with this, unfortunately. One of the many
things that were ignored during the beta that we pleaded with MS to make
available.

What you have to do is create your own categorization code. You can use the
MessageClass or Class of an item to get a general handle on what type of
item it is. For "Microsoft.Outlook.Mail.Read" you can check for EntryID = ""
and that tells you it's a new item (before it is saved). If on opening it
has no EntryID it's a "Compose" mode item. If it has an EntryID it's a
"Read" mode item. You can further check for or Fwd: in the subject and
for ConversationIndex and ConversationTopic to see if it's a forward or
reply or whatever.

If you check for MessageClass make sure to check for the start of the
MessageClass so you catch custom MessageClass items also.

From there you can also check for the existence of various ribbon tabs in
the existing item to help see what's what. For that of course you have to
make up a list of what's there for different types of open items. Of course
you can't assume that a tab isn't there just because it's not visible. For
example, in Mail.Read there's an Insert tab that's not visible until you use
Message tab, Other Actions, Edit Message when the Insert tab becomes
visible.

It's a bit of a mess actually.

--
Ken Slovak
[MVP - Outlook]
http://www.slovaktech.com
Author: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
Reminder Manager, Extended Reminders, Attachment Options
http://www.slovaktech.com/products.htm


"Nikolas" wrote in message
news
Thanks Ken that worked perfectly.

One more question plz: My custom groups in the Ribbon of the forms depend
on
the RibbonID. Since the GetCustomUI(string ribbonID) function gets called
only once, when the Ribbon is first loaded for a given RibbonID, how else
can
I find out the RibbonID of an inspector in order to use it in the callback
functions? So far I looked in the Inspector class and in the MailItem
class
but didn't find any property there.

Thanks in advance.
Nikolas