Question

The above said task seems so simple as per this stack overflow question or this MSDN How To.

But I am just struck at the line foreach (Outlook.MailItem mail in items), where I get an exception saying “Unable to cast COM object of type ‘System.__ComObject’ to interface type ‘Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MailItem’ …”.

Though there are quite a few posts about this exception, none could help me in getting over it.

Can someone please help me to solve this and to be able to read the emails from C#.

Thanks

Answer 1

Not every item in an Outlook Explorer is necessarily a MailItem. For example, public folders contain PostItems. If I remember correctly, conflict messages and meetings request also have their own item type.

Thus, I would design the loop as follows:

foreach (object item in items) {
    var mail = item as MailItem;
    if (mail != null) {
        // do something useful
        ...
    } else {
        // log or show some message box, so that you can debug this case
        ...
    }
}