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Registering a custom protoo url handler that Outlook recognizes?

Good morning,

I have successfully created a small application that registers under the regular uri protocol ("irma:") after writing msdn to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa767914(VS.85).aspx

This works great when opening such a link manually through the / cmd shell, etc., but when sending such links, Outlook does not automatically recognize those on clients that are installed in the registry key. Do I have to do something extra to allow Outlook to handle such a custom uri, or is it even possible?

Greetings and thanks, -j

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2 answers

[Well, I will post this as a new answer to keep it clean without deleting all previously posted content.]

I just repeated the study mentioned in my other answer, and it seems that the situation has improved significantly over the past three years. Both Outlook 2003 (SP3) and Outlook 2007 (SP2) will now automatically recognize all the protocols listed in the MS product support mail listed in the NG thread associated with my older answer , including url: -protocol!

The latter means that now you can write something like:

 url:irma:whatever

and properly bind and process. However, Outlook will execute a security confirmation dialog before executing the protocol handler.

Update:. Note that in Outlook 2003 SP3, new protocols (for example, url: mms:// , etc.) are only automatically linked in HTML emails. The plain text inspector behaves as described in my other answer. However, it does work with text messaging in Outlook 2007 SP2.

I still have not found any indication of the ability to simply register my own protocols in Outlook that will work without url: -prefix.

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Update: The information below is now out of date. See my other answer.

I did some research on this in the past and came to the conclusion that this is not possible. Protocols that Outlook can “automatically bind” appear to be hard-coded. The results of my previous research are documented in this news feed:

How to make custom APP recognizable Outlook / Word / ...
(published April-June 2005 at microsoft.public.inetsdk.programming.urlmonikers)

Quote from MS product support:

Unfortunately, the recognition of hyperlinks in Office - so that the automatic format automatically converts the entered text into a hyperlink - is hard-coded.
Therefore, you cannot add new protocols to recognition.

See the last post in this thread for my summary of differences in URL recognition between different Office programs (hint: Outlook support the fewest protocols).

Here are the relevant bits regarding Outlook. The following templates are automatically recognized as Outlook links (as of June 2005, i.e. Outlook 2003):

  • if the first word of the hyperlink

    • "www" (e.g. www.microsoft.com)
    • "ftp" (e.g. ftp.microsoft.com)

  • If the hyperlink begins with one of the following expressions, followed by ": /"

    • HTTP
    • Https
    • FTP
    • gopher
    • Prospero
    • telnet
    • WAIS
    • file

  • if the hyperlink starts with one of the following expressions, followed by ":" and a line (for example, mailto:blah )

    • MAILTO
    • news
    • NNTP
    • appearance
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