Read body of email with attachment using VBA in Outlook

Question

I have some VBA that checks the subject of every message as soon as it hits my inbox, and submits certain emails' contents over http to a server for processing.

This works great for messages with no attachments, but fails if there is an attachment on the email. I am using a http GET to submit the text.

What is the effect of the presence of an attachment on the body property of the message, and how can I ignore the attachment and submit only the email body text?

The VBA (trimmed for clarity but complete and functional):

Declarations:

Option Explicit
Private WithEvents olInboxItems As Items

On startup:

Private Sub Application_Startup()
    Set olInboxItems = Session.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox).Items
End Sub

On item added to inbox:

Private Sub olInboxItems_ItemAdd(ByVal Item As Object)

    On Error Resume Next

    Dim olMailItem As MailItem
    Dim strAttachmentName As String
    Dim submitResult As String

    If TypeOf Item Is MailItem Then
        Set olMailItem = Item

        If ((InStr(olMailItem.subject, "test subject") > 0)
            Dim subject As String
            subject = olMailItem.subject
            Dim contents As Variant
            contents = olMailItem.body
            Dim submitURL As String
            submitURL = "http:// ... " & subject & "..." & contents & "..."
            XMLHttpSynchronous submitURL
        End If
    End If
    Set Item = Nothing
    Set olMailItem = Nothing
End Sub

Http submit:

Sub XMLHttpSynchronous(ByVal URL As String)
    Dim XMLHttpRequest As XMLHTTP

    Set XMLHttpRequest = New MSXML2.XMLHTTP

    XMLHttpRequest.Open "GET", URL, False
    XMLHttpRequest.Send

End Sub

edit: I am now stripping attachments with the below code (tested and working) but the url still isn't submitting correctly.

    Set myattachments = olMailItem.Attachments
    While myattachments.Count > 0
        myattachments.Remove 1
    Wend

edit 2: I set contents=subject and the url submitted correctly, still no luck with the email's body, even after the message has been stripped of attachments

Answer 1

In order to get this working I stripped the attachments with the code in my first edit, than split the string of the body's text around the first and last character. I'm not sure why this works