Hi Tomaz
Yes, that is exactly the problem I had, and the limit of 260K characters is consistent with my tests. I can get round it by saving the HTML to disk using the MailItem.SaveAs method, and then reading the file back from disk. I would try doing that with a memory disk, but I suspect the SaveAs method will not like writing to it. An alternative would be to use the MailItem.Body property, which only has the text of the message and so is much shorter. I would really need my own parser to read such a file, and I can’t load PetitParser or PetitParser2 into Pharo 8. Presumably Pharo-Com should handle a long string more gracefully than just crashing the VM. But if these limits are intrinsic to COM in Windows, rather than Pharo-Com, there may be no way round it so it’s back to SaveAs. Thanks for confirming that it’s not down to an error of mine. Peter Kenny From: Pharo-users <pharo-users-boun...@lists.pharo.org> On Behalf Of Tomaž Turk Sent: 07 April 2020 21:27 To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org> Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo Thanks, Peter. I checked out the Outlook COM interface, noticed that the MailItem.HTMLBody property returns a string, which is implemented as BSTR in COM (more on this here: https://bytecomb.com/vba-internals-string-variables-and-pointers-in-depth/). I tested the maximum lengths of strings with Word and my images crash under these circumstances: - Pharo 8.0 64 bit when returning ByteString is longer than 16.379 characters - Pharo 8.0 32 bit when returning ByteString is longer than 260.080 characters (approximately). 64 bit image crashes without any warning, however the 32 bit one crashes with I presume this is the same behaviour as you report, Peter. I'm attaching the crash.dmp from 32 bit image. I believe that the crash happens when calling COMDispatchInstance>>propertyNamed: with the lengthy string to be returned. Pablo, I hope you have some time to check this, my knowledge ends somewhere here ... :-| Thanks and best wishes, Tomaz
