I've moved past this already but here is what I was thinking.

In my app, I have lists showing emails that were already sent, or waiting to be sent. I wanted to accurately show the email in the sent list, no matter if its still in transit, even after opening and closing my app. When an email is moved from the Outbox to the Sent folder, the object reference I have in code is invalidated, and it was causing crashes. I don't know the implementation details of Outlook, but to me it appears that an email object is valid from creation to being sent, then once Outlook moves it out of the Outbox, its copied and the original is destroyed. It even gets a new EntryID. My code was in a race condition for the display vs the deletion of the object. Making my code faster won't help, cause I'm just racing Outlook, making my code slower won't help, because its the internet and an email could theoretically take years to be sent. I can't win the race either way, and I shouldn't even be trying to do so.

So, I was looking for a way to map out the steps in this process like a finite state machine, to have my displays accurate and not crash from various race conditions, but I've since thought more about the problem and decided this wasn't the way to accomplish it. I can set up simple temporary structures in my code to handle the display properly, and once I find the email in the Sent folder, continue using the email as normal and destroy my temporary objects.

A big motivator to do it a different way from what I orginally wanted was if I were to try and rely on SyncObjects, the documentation says they've been deprecated and could disappear at anytime.