Outlook Not Responding when Sending or Managing a lot of Emails

[flavio.lara]

Hello Experts.

We are using Blue Prism version 6.5.1 and we have been having problems when sending or for example moving between Outlook folders a big number of e-mails (30, 50, 100). We have the message "Outlook Not Responding". When working with few items, the VBO works fine.

After that, the process moves to "Warning" status and we have to manually interfere to kill Outlook and make the Runtime available again.

As Microsoft VBOs (Outlook, Excel, and so on) don't have an Application Modeler, is there any way to raise an error and allow the process to close Outlook and recover the process flow? 
I am looking for something similar to the "time out" we have in Objects with Application Modeller.

Thanks a lot!

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Flavio Lara
System Analyst / RPA Developer
Vallourec Tubos do Brasil
America/Belo Horizonte/Brazil
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[MadhurChopra · Accepted solution]

Hey Flavio,

I am assuming you are calling action "Move Email to Inbox Subfolder" of the "MS Outlook Email VBO" to move emails and since the action accepts a single Entry ID as input, you have a loop to accomplish the mass move. If that assumption is correct, I have a few of questions:

1. At which iteration does Outlook stop responding?
2. Do you see any calls in the iteration being successful or does it fail on the first call?
3. If it fails after a few calls, have you tried any additional troubleshooting measures such as closing Outlook and restarting it?

To me the issue seems to be with the Office framework not responding so a solution at the BP end will need to be creative. One option to help with your situation is to break the move into smaller chunks since that seems to work fine; then close Outlook and start again. It's not the most efficient way, I know, but it's an option nonetheless. Alternatively, you could build an object to automate Outlook's front-end UI. While it will probably be a painful build given what you are trying to accomplish, I do believe it could work.

As for the timeout function, one possibility I can think of is to run a parallel process to check status of the main process moving emails. Since Outlook VBO code stages are executed in synchronous mode, BP will wait for a response to the call before proceeding to the next step. For that reason, it is not possible to set a timeout within the process.

I hope this helps.

Regards.

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Madhur Chopra
Sr. Product Consultant
Blue Prism - Professional Services
America/Los_Angeles
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[flavio.lara]

Hello Madhur!

Many thanks for your suggestions!

Answering your questions:

1. At which iteration does Outlook stop responding?
   • Outlook stops after "Send Email" or "Move Email to Inbox Sub Folder" actions
2. Do you see any calls in the iteration being successful or does it fail on the first call?
   • It works for some iteration and freezes after that. 
3. If it fails after a few calls, have you tried any additional troubleshooting measures such as closing Outlook and restarting it?
   • Yes, I have. Restarting Outlook works in most of the cases... then we can process some more items and then, we have the same problem. As we need to kill the Outlook process, when we try to start it again, sometimes we receive "Open in Security mode" messages. I fear that soon or later the .ost/.pst files can be corrupted because of that.

I will think about your suggestion to split the processing.

Best regards,

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Flavio Lara
System Analyst
Vallourec Tubos do Brasil
America/Sao_PauloBrazil
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