In the first part of this series, I gave an overview of the APIs you can use to access Outlook mail, along with directions for how to get started with Visual Basic for Applications.
As I mentioned, using the Outlook Object Model/VBA is both slow and throws up a lot of security warnings. I need to process a lot of mail messages, and I need a language that will handle both heavy data processing and advanced graphics for the work I'll need to do to turn the messages into a graph. This means I need a non-interpreted language with a lot of libraries, such as Java, C# or C++. Luckily, Extended MAPI is an old-school COM API that fits well with C++, and avoids the security restrictions.
One thing I didn't realize about MAPI is that it's usable even if you're not running as an Outlook plugin. It's designed to let third-party programs interact with the user's mail store, and is available as long as Outlook has been installed on the system. This OutlookCode.com page is the most in-depth description and bibliography I've found.
The down-side of MAPI is that it's COM, offers a lot of functionality, and has been implemented slightly differently by each version of Office. This means that using it can be tough, just getting to the 'hello world' level requires a lot of work, and past that there's a lot of pits with spikes at the bottom to wander into. What I needed was a good code example to get me started.
Lucian Wischik came to the rescue, with some wonderful sample code demonstrating exactly how to use MAPI, along with some utility functions to simplify access, ample commentary explaining what was going on, and a completely public domain license for use. Amazingly, this is the third time in recent months that I've found what I was looking for on Lucian's site. He also has the best samples on the web for writing a BHO without ATL, and hosting IE web rendering inside your own window. He must be accruing some serious good karma.
With Lucian's help, it's not too hard to create your own standalone executable that enumerates Outlook folders and items, and extracts information from them. Unfortunately, it's not always possible to pull out the full HTML body of the message, but I'm mostly interested in the sender and receivers of each email which is easily accessible. It runs a lot faster than the equivalent VBA code, and doesn't bring up any security dialogs.
Funhouse Photo User Count: 1,892 total, 101 active. Almost exactly the same as last night, so I must be looking at the same sample window in the stats.
Event Connector User Count: 82 total, 4 active. Also very similar.
It sounds greatly, but i'm still confused with how to create a plain(or pure) C++ app as the outlook plugin, would you like to have a details talk with me? My msn: ats_stalone@hotmail.com
Posted by: jason | October 21, 2008 at 03:53 AM
Hi Jason,
I'd recommend looking at Add-in Express, it's by far the easiest way I've found of creating Outlook plugins:
http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2008/09/creating-an-out.html
Pete
Posted by: Pete Warden | October 21, 2008 at 02:25 PM