P: Exported emails don't appear in Outlook sent items folder.

John Verne, that's my whole point -- and you've just proven that you're mistaken. I did what you asked, and when I clicked on the link containing the mailto HREF that you specified, the Outlook message that was created DID have the Save Sent Item To option set to my default Sent Items folder, and a copy of the outgoing message WAS saved when I sent it. (There was no attachment in the message, though.)

Again, again, that's my whole point. Outlook is just doing what it's told. Every other program I have come across that calls Outlook for sending its email -- and even the simple mailto link that you asked me to try -- leaves the default setting for Save Sent Item To alone. Lightroom is the exception. That is why it is pretty clear that there's something that Lightroom is doing in calling Outlook that is causing the message not to be saved.

As you know from the link you created, mailto has attributes that can be specified as part of the call. MAPI too. So it would stand to reason that one of those attributes somehow affects the behavior of the Save Sent Item To setting. And Lightroom is messing that up.

John Verne, that's my whole point -- and you've just proven that you're mistaken. I did what you asked, and when I clicked on the link containing the mailto HREF that you specified, the Outlook message that was created DID have the Save Sent Item To option set to my default Sent Items folder, and a copy of the outgoing message WAS saved when I sent it.

Again, again, that's my whole point. Outlook is just doing what it's told. Every other program I have come across that calls Outlook for sending its email -- and even the simple mailto link that you asked me to try -- leaves the default setting for Save Sent Item To alone. Lightroom is the exception. That is why it is pretty clear that there's something that Outlook is doing in calling Outlook that is causing the message not to be saved.

As you know from the link you created, mailto has several attributes that can be specified as part of the call. MAPI too. So it would stand to reason that one of those attributes somehow affects the behavior of the Save Sent Item To setting. And Lightroom is messing that up.

I guess what I'm saying is that, if this is a mailto: link that Outlook is handling because the OS is telling it to (i.e., an outlook edit window is coming up), then there is little Lightroom can do to change this. Once the mailer is open, what it does in terms of saving the message and so on is a function of the mailer, not the agent that initiated the mailto link in the first place.

An easy test would be to construct a mailto link with an "attach=" clause, and see what Outlook does.

mailto:lastname.firstname@xxx.com?subject=Test_Attachment&body=Thisisatestemail.&attach=C:\DocumentsandSettings\username\Desktop\foldername\APPname_20121123.log

Change the email address to match your account in Outlook. Change the path after the "&attach=" to point to a test file to attach to the email. Put this link in a web page and click on it from a web browser.

Okay, you've gone way above my head! Thanks, though.

Hopefully somebody from Adobe will read this and adjust the way Lightroom makes the call to Outlook in version 4.3. Again, since other programs manage to call Outlook in a way that results in sent messages being saved, there must be a way for Lightroom to do this as well. I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, but from an end user's perspective, the experience is identical when sending email from Lightroom as it is when sending email from, say, IrfanView -- except that one doesn't save a copy in Sent Items and the other does.

Cheers!

AFAIK, there is no such thing as an SMTP header called "account". I doubt it is using MAPI, though if it is then using Outlook as a service is probably never going store the sent messages, as Outlook is not really acting as a mailer.

If it is bringing up an Outlook edit window with a MIME attachment for the image, which you can further edit with body content and it is still not saving a copy in the Sent Items folder, then this is not a mailto protocol issue, either. At this point, mailto has triggered the OS protocol handler, and the rest is up to the mailer.

At issue is that Outlook is starting up in a state where it does not automatically do this. Now, Outlook has "smart" features (like any other modern mailer) that tries to sense which "account" a message is associated with. And it has the notion of a default account. My guess is that under these circumstances, some Outlook configurations will start up with a default account setting that has no associated Sent Items folder.

As a hail-mary, you can try to force the account settings via these registry settings:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\14.0\outlook\options
DWORD VALUE 1 ForceAccountSelection

I don't know if this is supported for your version of Outlook, so you might have to change that "14.0" to something reasonable on your system.

Now, all this might do is save the items to the "wrong" sent items folder, especially if you are using an IMAP account. If this is the case, then the problem is definitely how Outlook as the mailto handler is deciding how to manage mail items it is being told to manage.

P.S. Does anybody know whether bug reports like this posted here find their way to the Adobe product team? Or do we have to raise bugs via a different route?

P.P.S. I take back what I wrote about the built-in email client being an acceptable workaround if it had a "Bcc by default" option. That would only be acceptable if the built-in client also came with the option to send photos as true attachments rather than as in-line images. The latter just doesn't work well for many recipients, especially on Windows systems.

John Verne: thank you for the response. Unfortunately, this is not a satisfactory work-around. The problem is that there does not appear to be any attribute unique to Lightroom-generated email that is accessible from the Outlook Rules Wizard and that can be used to trigger such a rule. (I tried using "Has an attachment," but that resulted in getting two copies of Outlook-originated email with attachments.)

Although I don't know the details, I have to disagree that Lightroom has nothing to do with this problem. When other programs make a mailto (or is it MAPI?) call to Outlook (including web browsers, and including even the freeware IrfanView image viewer), the problem doesn't happen. So there must be something missing from or unique to the way Lightroom is making the call that is causing the default "Save Sent Item To" setting to be overridden.

(The only difference I can see when searching through a Lightroom-generated message vs. an Outlook- or Firefox-generated message is that the former leaves the "Account" field blank -- and it defaults to the primary account -- while the others seem to populate the "Account" field with the primary account explicitly. I don't know whether this is related.)

Adobe: Please address this. It's a major flaw in the LR email workflow. If the Outlook-specific issue cannot be resolved, then an acceptable (but suboptimal) workaround would be for Lightroom to provide a "Bcc by default" option so all LR-generated email could be Bcc'ed back to the sender, whether the email is sent directly from LR or via a mailto (MAPI?) call to Outlook or any other email client.

Assuming all Lightroom is doing is telling the OS to handle the "mailto" protocol request, I'm uncertain what more can be done. It is odd.

However, here is a potential workaround (I don't use Outlook for any reason anymore, so I cannot test this):

Create a rule based on “Apply rule on messages I send”, and possible some keyword in the other headers -- the idea is that you want Lightroom-originating emails to trigger the rule.

Have this rule drop a copy into any folder you like, including the regular Sent Items folder.

When emailing photographs from within Lightroom 4.2 (Windows) via Microsoft Outlook 2010, a copy of the sent mail is not saved in Outlook's Sent Items folder even when Outlook is configured to save a copy of all outgoing messages by default.

The Lightroom call to Outlook results in an Outlook outgoing message window with the message's Options | Save Sent Item To option set to Do Not Save instead of the usual Use Default Folder. (See screenshot below.)

The user can manually change the setting back to Use Default Folder for each individual message, but it's easy to forget to do -- and once you hit Send, it's too late.

There must be something misconfigured in the Lightroom call to Outlook, because this unwanted behavior isn't observed in other programs that call Outlook for sending email (i.e., other programs' mailto calls result in the outgoing message having Use Default Folder for Options | Save Sent Item To, and the email leaves a copy in the Sent Items folder as it should).

Adobe? Can you please fix this in 4.3?

This problem still exists in Lightroom 4.2, and it's 100% reproducible.

The Lightroom call to Outlook results in an Outlook outgoing message with the message's Options > Save Sent Item set to "Do Not Save" instead of the usual "Use Default Folder."

The user can manually change the setting back to "Use Default Folder" for every message but it's easy to forget to do.

There must be something misconfigured in the Lightroom call to Outlook, because other mailto: links don't cause this unwanted behavior (ie, other mailto calls result in the outgoing message having the Use Default Folder for Options > Save Sent Item).

Adobe? Can you please fix this in 4.3?