I am attempting desperately (and failing) to use Win32::OLE to manipulate emails in Outlook 2007. The code below is a fairly stripped down version... note that I have no problem marking an email Read or Unread, however setting other properties, and calling some methods, doesn't work. :( The most frustrating part is that once in awhile, it DOES work for 1 email, but not any of the others! And I can't reliably reproduce the success. In desperation, you'll note in the code that I tried looping through a single email infinitely until it set the Category correctly... but that doesn't work either :( Please show me the error(s) of my ways! Thanks for any response, even if it is just to call me stupid!

use strict;
use warnings;
use Win32::OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Const 'Microsoft Outlook';

$|++;

#get an Outlook object
my $outlook;
$outlook = Win32::OLE->new('Outlook.Application');
die unless $outlook;

#get the Inbox folder
my $namespace = $outlook->GetNamespace("MAPI");

my $folder = $namespace->Folders("My Folder");

my $n = $folder->Items->Count;
my $i=0;
my $from;

for ($i=$n; $i>0; $i--) {
    $from = $folder->Items($i)->{'SenderEmailAddress'};
    if ($from eq "sender@myemail.com") {
        if ($folder->Items($i)->{'Unread'}) {
            $folder->Items($i)->{'Unread'}=0;                         
+             #<--- this works
            print "Is it? before - ".$folder->Items($i)->{'IsMarkedAsT
+ask'}."\n";  #<--- always returns 0
            $folder->Items($i)->MarkAsTask(0);                        
+     #<--- I don't think this works
            print "Is it? after -  ".$folder->Items($i)->{'IsMarkedAsT
+ask'}."\n";  #<--- always returns 0
            print "Cats before: ".$folder->Items($i)->Categories."\n";
            while ($folder->Items($i)->Categories ne "NAC12182") {
                $folder->Items($i)->{'Categories'}="NAC12182";        
+     #<--- this doesn't work
            }
            print "Cats after: ".$folder->Items($i)->Categories."\n";
        }
    }
}
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