10/21/2008 1:32:06 PM
I had a need yesterday to query a bunch of Outlook e-mails: 44,743 to be exact. This was the result of a clients mailing list account being setup incorrectly and we just found out about it! An e-mail account was setup strictly for the mailing list and it was never properly setup as an Outlook account locally. No big deal. When the hosting provider contacted us to clean it up I noticed that there were a BUNCH of bad e-mail addresses (Return to sender, bad account, etc...). At first I started to click on individual e-mails, copy the bad e-mail address to a .txt file, then search that folder for the same e-mail address and delete the results. That takes FOOOOORRREEEEVVVVEEEEERRRRRRR. Then I realized I could dork around with Outlook via a C# console application and harvest the e-mails and output them in a sorted Excel spreadsheet.
Enter Microsoft.Office.Core and Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook namespaces. I decided it would be best to create a little C# console application utilizing these namespaces to search the e-mail, write a little regular expression pattern (by write I mean copy & paste one from the interwebs) to parse out e-mail addresses, and add e-mail addresses that didn't have the host name or the reply e-mail account in it to a List<string> (if it didn't already contain it!). It was pretty easy.
First:
using
Outlook = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook;
using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook;
I'm not going to bore you with the entire application unless you really want it. I'll just get you to the point where you can start to do stuff with your e-mails.
Now you need to instantiate your Outlook object.
Outlook.Application application = new Application();
Outlook.NameSpace nameSpace = application.GetNamespace("MAPI");
Outlook.MAPIFolder mapiFolder = nameSpace.GetDefaultFolder(OlDefaultFolders.olFolderJunk);
It might be worth mentioning the olFolderJunk business you see there. In the interest of time I didn't want to mess around with trying to navigate to the folder that I actually stored these e-mails in since I have a bunch of subfolders in Outlook due to using multiple accounts and a handful of rules and what-not. So in the interest of time I moved all the e-mails to the junk folder since I could easily access it. I think the correct syntax would be something like:
nameSpace.Folders["FOLDER"].Folders["SUB"].Folders["YOU_GET_IT"];
Moving on. Once you finally get access to your designated folder you need to start being able to do stuff with the items in that folder. It's as easy as enumerating the, you guessed it; MailItem objects a la:
foreach
(MailItem mailItem in mapiFolder.Items)
{
// do stuff
}
Easy. The properties are fairly braindead as well. MailItem Object Members
Have fun. I'll probably use this in the future as well.
C#,
Code
