Outlook Smart Quote

I know a lot of fellow hackers are stuck with Exchange at their workplace. Using the Outlook thick client is the only real way to talk to Exchange servers (yes, I know about OWA, and outlook's imap support, and offline-imap, and isync, etc. They all don't scale for one reason or the other)

It turns out that on a reasonably performant box, Outlook with cached exchange mode isn't quite so bad. You can get search folders that work (unlike Thunderbird), a client that doesn't crash (unlike Evolution), and on with Windows Desktop Search enabled, even a pretty good search experience. The real remaining problem is the email composition. In particular, responding to plain text format emails (a must for sending and recieving emails with code snippets) and using the conventional quoting style, where each line is prefixed with a > character.

While Outlook has the ability to insert the >'s for you, it totally falls over when these extra characters push a line's length past the line wrap limit (by default 76 characters). This "bug" alone makes corresponding with plain text emails a huge pain.

Outlook Smart Quote is an outlook addin that adds better plain text mail quoting capabilities to outlook. Along the same lines of what Outlook-QuoteFix or the QuoteFix Macro try to do.

Releases

New .NET versions!

• 04/09/2009 - version 0.7.9 - smartquote-0.7.9.zip
  
  • Recognizes lists where whitespace after list marker is a tab
  • New option to convert HTML mails to plain text when replying
• 02/24/2009 - version 0.7.8 - smartquote-0.7.8.zip
  
  • List recognition now handles numbered lists that look like:

    1. foo
    2. bar
    
    1) foo
    2) bar
    

• 01/25/2009 - version 0.7.7 - smartquote-0.7.7.zip
  
  • An improved quoting algorithm that better handles lists where the list items start with '*' or '-' characters followed by a space. Also better handles paragraphs where the first line is indented.
  • More debugging stuff.
• 01/25/2009 - version 0.7.6 - smartquote-0.7.6.zip
  
  • New menu item to temporarily disable smart quote.
  • Code refactoring to separate quoting algorithm into a library so I can create some unit testing around it.
  • More debugging infrastructure to track down Explorer tracking bug. If anyone has a repro case, please contact me!
• 10/19/2008 - version 0.7.5 - smartquote-0.7.5.zip
  A new options panel that lets you configure two options: A new kind of "from" that triggers Outlook's mail header highlighting, and the ability to remove the spaces between multiple ">" characters. Also a bit more for field debugability.
• 08/13/2008 - version 0.7.4 - smartquote-0.7.4.zip
  This version has some small improvements for better field debugability. No new features.
• 08/05/2008 - version 0.7.3 - smartquote-0.7.3.zip
  Fixes a bug in the quoting algorithm where sometimes adjacent words got stuck together without a space in between in quoted text.
• 08/01/2008 - version 0.7.2 - smartquote-0.7.2.zip
  Fixes a bug where a "reply" selected from a right-click context menu for an item that's not in an Explorer's current selection does get caught by SmartQuote.
• 07/29/2008 - version 0.7.1 - smartquote-0.7.1.zip

Installing

1. Outlook 2007 is required. XP or Vista (32 or 64bit). Make sure you installed Outlook with the Programmable Interop Assemblies feature enabled!
2. Download smartquote-x.y.z.zip from above.
3. Manually uninstall any previous versions.
4. Open zip file and pull smartquote folder out onto your desktop
5. Launch the setup.exe in the folder, go through the wizard (this will install .NET 3.5 as well as the VSTO runtime for you if you don't have them already)

Using

Warning

Compared with Outlook-QuoteFix and QuoteFixMacro

Outlook-QuoteFix has a pretty good quoting algorithm, but it seems fundamentally flawed in that it tries to operate on text that outlook has already quoted. This means that the algorithm never gets to see the text before it was quoted, so there are lots of cases where it works suboptimally.

QuoteFixMacro has nice integration with the client UI because it's implemented as a macro for which you can create toolbar buttons and menu items. Unfortunately, the quoting algorithm itself is really basic, and produces undesirable results very often.

Outlook Smart Quote tries to give you the best of both worlds. A good integration with the UI through using Outlook Extensibiilty COM API's, and a proper algorithm that hooks in to outlook at the right level in order to pull out the pre-quoted text, and apply quoting and re-wrapping itself.

Feedback

You can email me at smartquote at kendeeter dot com.

Old python versions (unmaintained)

• 04/14/2008 - version 0.9.1 - smartquoteaddin.py
  Added a SmartQuote menu to the menubar. Buttons now show same icons as standard buttons of similar function. A little bit better cleanup on shutdown.
• 04/14/2008 - version 0.9 - smartquoteaddin.py
• 04/14/2008 - version 0.8 - smartquoteaddin.py

Development notes for the old python version