Change hyperlink based on date in Outlook 2013 - vba

Question

Every day our Helpdesk has to send out a report. That report needs to link to a website that displays that days statistics.
Example URL:
http://hostname/dashboardname/date
Which would look like this:
http://hostname/HelpdeskTickets/2015-03-18
Heres what I've tried:
First I looked into field code values and doing something like this
{HYPERLINK "http://hostname/HelpdeskTickets/{DATE \# "yyyy-MM-dd"}"}
And this works, until you close the outlook message. If you don't have F9 to update the field code, and save and close the .msg file it will disappear leaving just the blank link without a date. If you hit F9 before closing it, it puts that days date into the field, however when you close and save it the field code disappears and leaves the date in place of the date field code. Also I noticed this problem doesn't happen in word. You can save and close a word file and it keeps the field codes.
Another thing I've tried is to use VBA to edit the links in the message body. So far nothing has actually worked.
The only thing that partially worked was taking the body of the document and using a string replace function on it. However this destroys all formatting and hyperlinks along with it.
I'm open to any ideas on how this can be achieved.
My main problem is that the people at the helpdesk can't seem to use anything that isn't fool proof. So having them press F9 before sending this email was actually scaring people that they wouldn't be able to do that.

Answer 1

You can use VBA to edit the message body programmatically. It is not clear what code you used earlier, but the main ways are described below:
HTMLBody - a string representing the HTML body of the specified item. The HTMLBody property should be an HTML syntax string.
The Word editor. The WordEditor property of the Inspector class returns an instance of the Document class from the Word object model. So, the message body is represented by the Word Document.
You can read more about all possible ways in the Chapter 17: Working with Item Bodies.