Outlook Inspector Activate doesn't bring in foreground - vba

Question

I have a PowerShell script that search for an email and then open it
Once I have the MailItem object, I get his inspector with MailItem.GetInspector and then I try to display the mail in foreground thanks to Inspector.Display and Inspector.Activate. The doc for Activate method says :
Activates an inspector window by bringing it to the foreground and
setting keyboard focus.
But the Activate doesn't work, the mail is open, but it stays in background, it's not in foreground. And I don't know and don't find why.
My PowerShell script :
param(
[string] $Subject,
[string] $Path
)
[Console]::OutputEncoding = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8;
Add-type -assembly "Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook" | out-null
$olFolders = "Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.olDefaultFolders" -as [type]
$outlook = new-object -comobject outlook.application
$namespace = $outlook.GetNameSpace("MAPI")
$subfolder = $Path.Split('/')
$folder = $namespace.Folders($subfolder[1])
for($i=2; $i -lt $subfolder.Length; $i++) {
$folder = $folder.Folders($subfolder[$i])
}
$filter = "#SQL=urn:schemas:httpmail:subject LIKE '%"+$Subject+"%'"
$mail = $folder.items.find($filter)
$inspector = $mail.GetInspector
$inspector.Display()
$inspector.Activate()
I try with only $inspector.Display() or inspector.Activate(), but the result is the same, the window is displayed, but stay in background.
Thanks for your help !!

Answer 1

Windows would not let a background process (such as outlook.exe) to set the foreground window - keep in mind that even through your process might be in the foreground, the call is marshalled into the outlook.exe address space, which it turn executes it.
To work around that, you'd need to attach the current foreground window to your thread using AttachThreadInput() Windows API function, but you cannot call it from PS.
If using Redemption is an option (I am its author), it exposes SafeInspector.Active method, which will work whether outlook or your process are in the background. In VBS:
Set sInspector = CreateObject("Redemption.SafeInspector")
sInspector.Item = inspector
sInspector.Activate