Question

My company requires me to use Outlook for my E-mail. Outlook does virtually nothing the way I want to do it and it frustrates me greatly. (I’m not trying to start a flame war here, it must do exactly what thousands of CEO’s want it to do, but I’m not a CEO.)

I would like to be able to automatically extract the thousands of E-mails and attachments currently in my Outlook account and save them in my own alternative storage format where I can easily search them and organize them the way I want. (I’m not requesting suggestions for the new format.)

Maybe some nice open source program already can do this… that would be great. Please let me know.

Otherwise, how can I obtain the message content and the attachments without going through the huge collection manually? Even if I could only get the message content and the names of the attachments, that would be sufficient. Is there documentation of the Outlook mail storage format? Is there a way to query Outlook for the data?

Maybe there is an alternative approach I haven’t considered?

My preferred language to do this is C#, but I can use others if needed.

Answer 1

Outlook Redemption is the best thing currently to use that I have found. It will allow you to get into the messages and extract the attachments and the message bodies. i am using it now to do just that.

Here is some code I use in a class. I included the constructor and the processing function I use to save off the attachments. I cut out the code that is specific to my needs but you can get an idea of what to use here.

    private RDOSession _MailSession = new RDOSession();     private RDOFolder _IncommingInbox;     private RDOFolder _ArchiveFolder;     private string _SaveAttachmentPath;      public MailBox(string Logon_Profile, string IncommingMailPath,                     string ArchiveMailPath, string SaveAttPath)     {         _MailSession.Logon(Logon_Profile, null, null, true, null, null);         _IncommingInbox = _MailSession.GetFolderFromPath(IncommingMailPath);         _ArchiveFolder = _MailSession.GetFolderFromPath(ArchiveMailPath);         _SaveAttachmentPath = SaveAttPath;     } public void ProcessMail()         {              foreach (RDOMail msg in _IncommingInbox.Items)             {                 foreach (RDOAttachment attachment in msg.Attachments)                 {                     attachment.SaveAsFile(_SaveAttachmentPath + attachment.FileName);                     }                 }                 if (msg.Body != null)                 {                     ProcessBody(msg.Body);                 }              }          } 

edit: This is how I call it and what is passed

MailBox pwaMail = new MailBox('Self Email User', @'\\Mailbox - Someone\Inbox',                               @'\\EMail - Incomming\Backup', @'\\SomePath');