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.
On the Search tab, click Advanced, and then define your search criteria. On the Search tab, click Save. The Smart Folder appears in the navigation pane. Type a name for the Smart Folder.
Choose the emails you want to save > click the File tab. Click Save As. In the Save in list, click the location where you want to save the file.
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");
If you want to extract your e-mails take a look at Outlook Email Extractor at codeproject http://69.10.233.10/KB/dotnet/OutlookEmailExtractor.aspx
rob www.filefriendly.com
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