My current mission to create a social graph from my mailbox. I need to get access to the raw data on my email habits, and the easiest platform for that is Outlook, since it offers a plugin API. I had no clue how to get started with it though, and most articles I could find assumed some level of familiarity with the technology, so here's a guide covering what I discovered on the absolute basics.
The first thing I discovered is, like standards, that the great thing about Outlook APIs is that there's so many to choose from! The second discovery was that the flood of email viruses using those APIs a few years ago led Microsoft to barricade most of them behind heavy security. Luckily, there's a lot of people writing Outlook code, and so there's a lot of examples and resources to learn from. The best starting point is http://outlookcode.com/, but plain google searching will usually throw up some answers to even fairly obscure questions.
Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) are a legacy interface API, and using them will often bring up scary security dialogs, since Outlook assumes you're doing something malicious.
The Outlook Object Model (OOM) is the most common way of working with the data held by Outlook. It the interface you use by default when writing Visual Basic for Applications macros within the app, it's well documented and supported, though you have to be careful for differences between app versions. Unfortunately for us, it's also hedged in by security warning dialogs and restrictions. Because you generally have to make an API call for each mail item you want to deal with, it can be very slow if you want to handle thousands of them at once.
Extended MAPI is an advanced interface to the mail store in Outlook, and it's mostly commonly used from from C++ or other compiled languages. The good news is that you've got access to almost any information, with no security UI. The bad news is that it's not well documented, and is tricky to work with. Because you can access lots of items at once, without the overhead of an interpreted call every time, it can be a lot faster when you're working with large numbers of emails.
Redemption is a third-party library that combines a lot of the advantages of Extended MAPI and OOM. Under the hood it uses MAPI, and so it's fast and avoids security warnings, but it exposes an interface that's a carbon copy of OOM, which makes it simple to use. It's a real feat of engineering by Dmitry Streblechenko, and he's also been very prolific in answering Outlook programming questions. At only $200 for an unlimited distribution version, it's a great deal.
Getting started prototyping your code is as simple as pressing Alt+F11 in Outlook. This will bring up a separate VBA code window. If you select the session in the left pane, then take any of the simple examples out there and paste them in, you should be able to run them by hitting F5.
To make Redemption available, run its installer and then it should appear in the code editor's Tools->References dialog box as an option. Then just reference its objects like any of the built-in types.
I've managed to create a simple prototype that loops through all the messages in a folder and outputs the basic information I need to build my graph to a text file. It's slow, probably only a few dozen messages a second, but it should be good enough to let me create the foundation for a social graph. I'm moving over several years worth of email now, so I'll have a good data-set to work with.
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