>Looked at Microsoft Office Automation with Visual FoxPro. Outlook does not have the most helpful behavior. Thanks for your help.

Outlook, for how I remember it, was always too weird for me. I had it on my home machine only briefly, while I was trying to convert some message archives into .dbf; for me, Outlook was something that you have to suffer when you can't telecommute :). So I tried this on Excel.

>Outlook behaves differently than Excel.

That's because the manufacturer of Excel is not at best terms with the manufacturer of Outlook :)

>For example, with your example as soon as you create the ox object, you can see properties in the watch window. For Outlook the only think you can see is "GetNamespace". It doesn't show pems with amembers either, but it does with intellisense. If you access any of the properties with the help of intellisense, or because you just knew the name, it then shows up with amembers. It's as if you are looking at a proxy object that only gets properties added as they are discovered some other way. Wonder how I can tell the object to find all underlying properties?

I figure you'd have to drill into its DOM manually until you get to the message level. Maybe declaring the oMessage as Mapi.Message or something like that may help - though, it would work for IDE and intellisense, not sure it would work for runtime.

Right - it won't. Just tried with oex=createobject("Shell.Explorer.2"), and it returned only six properties. But then, don't trust my installation, I've done some big cleaning on my machine, and I'm getting some errors when using the object browser and project manager hooks, which probably means that not all .tlbs are properly registered on my machine.

This is actually the reason I started my answer with "it can't be done", and then tried with Excel and proved myself wrong. The answer is, actually, the traditional "it depends" :).