Question

I want to be able to create an email message with an attachment, but not send it.
The email should open in Outlook where the user can send himself.

I have been playing around with Mailto: command in order to open a new mail message, however, Outlook client doesn’t seem to support adding attachments using the Mailto: command.

I do not want to use COM to do this.

Does anyone know of a way to achieve this? I think it might not be possible without COM.

Answer 1

The only way around COM (or VSTO) I can think of would be to use the command line options of Outlook. Using Process.Start you could start Outlook with the options described in this answer (by VonC):

Open a new mail message:

    outlook.exe /c ipm.note

Open a new mail message and populate
sender:

    outlook.exe /c ipm.note /m [e-mail]

Open a new mail message with
attachment:

    outlook.exe /c ipm.note /a filename

Combination:

    outlook.exe /c ipm.note /m [e-mail]&subject=test%20subject&body=test%20body

You can retrieve the installation folder of Outlook from the following Registry keys:

Outlook 2007:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\InstallRoot

Outlook 2003:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\InstallRoot

Outlook XP:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Outlook\InstallRoot