TL;DR

I discovered about X-Unsent.

I like automating repetitive tasks with small command-line programs because it’s fun and spares me a lot of errors, mostly in the form of things I forget. So it’s no wonder that after the thirdAHEMthirtiest email with the same shape, I thought about automating the generation of those emails too.

For reasons that I’m not willing to confeAHEMdisclose, I’m not sending those email straight away but through the Outlook client. Only fact is, when I generate an email in a valid, standards-compliant way using Perl (via module MIME::Entity, in particular), opening it with a double click makes it appear like I received it, so to actually send it I have to either reply or forward.

Yuck.

This time I decided that enough is enough and give another spin to the search wheel. Which, to be honest, seems like it’s been reset to the nineties, considering the quality of the results, or even worse, considering that there was not that much advertising at the time yet.

But I’m digressing.

This time I got lucky with this result (I can’t remember my actual query): EML files no longer opening as a draft e-mail to send.

Oh-oh! So it was at least possible in the past!

I find the first reply… curious: you can revert back. Well, that’s lateral thinking at its finest.

Sarcasm apart, the original sender was kind enough to also provide a solution that still seems to work in the Outlook I have in Windows: set a custom header X-Unsent to 1:

X-Unsent: 1

When this like appears in the email’s headers in the file, double-clicking on it opens the email in draft mode, complete with a shiny Send button.

Thanks Ralph Taylor!