Handling My Email In .NET Code

I was thinking about improving some of my email inbox processing recently and I spent some time refreshing my memory on email processing from .NET.  I wanted to be able to grab a whole lot of emails from my inbox that met certain criteria and extract information from them into Excel.  I could have got this wrong but here's what I found.

I started off trying to work with WebDAV.  And I found a support article which led me to write this code snippet to retrieve an email.

Request = (System.Net.

HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(“https://email-server/Exchange/account/Inbox/EmailSubject.EML“);
Request.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
Request.Method = "GET";
Request.Headers.Add("Translate", "f");
Response = (HttpWebResponse)Request.GetResponse();
ResponseStream = Response.GetResponseStream();
sr = new StreamReader(ResponseStream, Encoding.UTF8);
s = sr.ReadToEnd();
Console.WriteLine(s);

I could get listings of email folders from WebDAV using this and I could retrieve a whole email.  I found that I had to use regular expressions to parse them out of the headers and this wasn't what I had intended to do.  I wanted to get the sender and any flags as properties without having to parse them myself.  So next, I looked at CDO and MAPI but I came across this support article which stopped me in that investigation.

813349 Support Policy for Microsoft Exchange APIs with .NET Framework
https://support.microsoft.com/?id=813349

Next, I found SlipStick Systems email developers portal from which I learnt plenty.  And it gave me the idea to use the Outlook Add-ins API.  They had a link to this article from which I wrote code that could browse my email inbox and get the properties out that I wanted.  Here's the article that I used successfully.

https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=313795

Also at SlipStick there's a neat Outlook Add-In called TODI that let's you extract email attachments to your hard disk, replacing them in the email with a link.

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 16, 2003
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  December 16, 2003
  I fixed the typo :-)
• Anonymous
  July 15, 2004
  need email code