How do I set Expiration Dates (Outlook 2003)

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Reading through some items on Archiving, and Microsoft’s Help brought up expiration dates, and the fact that you can set an expiration date when you create an item in calendar. I can’t see anywhere on the appointment form where to select an expiration date, and if I do a query in Help for expiration date, well, I can’t seem to get anything meaningful. Can someone enlighten me please?

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As far as I know you can’t set an expiration date for appointments, only for e-mail messages. Others will no doubt correct me if I’m wrong.

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I looked into mail options and found it there, but Microsoft says:
Expired items are mail and meeting items whose content is no longer valid after a certain date, such as a meeting you had four months ago that still appears on your calendar. Although an expiration date is optional, you can define it at the time you create the item or at a later date.

I thought that meant calendar items as well.

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The description certainly suggests that, but I suspect that it’s incorrect.

If you look at Tools | Options…, Other tab, AutoArchive, you’ll see that there is an option to “Delete expired items (e-mail folders only)”.

Perhaps it’s a case of miscommunication between the programmers and the authors of the help text, or else the latter had been ingesting illegal substances…

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I do think someone (or maybe quite a few someones) ingest illegal substances at Microsoft. Certainly some of their decisions, new features (missed out features) etc lead me to think that!

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There is some kind of subtle difference between a meeting request (MeetingItem) and the resulting calendar entry created after acceptance (AppointmentItem). The former resembles an email message (MailItem) in that it has an ExpiryTime property, but the latter lacks this property. At least based on what is exposed to VBA. So the help appears to be somewhat confused.

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Thanks for the investigative work! I’m only wanting to look at this through a user’s eyes as I’m writing a training manual at the moment. Also the little experience I have had with Outlook VBA tells me to throw it in the too hard basket (unless there have been significant improvements over earlier versions). I’ll stick to training the users, and Word VBA!

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