title: Accept outlook meeting invite with HTML body in reply (using exchange webservices)
body: <p>I've written a service that queries an exchange mailbox using exchange webservices to schedule video conference meetings. the idea of this service is to accept meeting invites, query a SQL database for available dial in details out of a pool of details, it then writes these dial in details as HTML body into the accepted email.</p>
  
  <p>This works great when the email account that the invite was sent from is on the same exchange server. </p>
  
  <p>when however the invite comes from an external participant then the accepted mail body only comes through as plain text.</p>
  
  <p>here is my code (for testing I have made the body very simple)</p>
  
  <pre><code>Dim accept As AcceptMeetingInvitationMessage = appoint.CreateAcceptMessage(False)
  accept.Body = New MessageBody(BodyType.HTML, "&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;span style=""color:red""&gt;This should be red text&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;")
  accept.Send()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>this works internally and the text comes out red, externally however it does not.</p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE:</strong>
  I might have already found the issue, the global message formatting setting on our exchange server for all external domains was set to follow Outlook client settings. </p>
  
  <p>So since my app isn't using outlook to reply to messages the Exchange server formats it as Rich Text which the external mail client does not understand.</p>
  
  <p>will update again on Monday as we need to restart the Exchange transport service for the change to take.</p>
  
  <p>info found here: <a href="https://www.codetwo.com/kb/how-to-configure-exchange-server-2000-2003-to-send-rtf-messages-in-html-format/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.codetwo.com/kb/how-to-configure-exchange-server-2000-2003-to-send-rtf-messages-in-html-format/</a></p>
  
  <p>and here: <a href="http://support.risualblogs.com/blog/2011/02/24/html-mails-sent-via-owa-and-outlook-2011-are-received-as-plain-text-mails-externally/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://support.risualblogs.com/blog/2011/02/24/html-mails-sent-via-owa-and-outlook-2011-are-received-as-plain-text-mails-externally/</a></p>