webDAV or MAPI or something else?

[planetthoughtful]

Hi All,

I need to build a console app that can connect to a mailbox on a
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server located on our intranet to do the
following:

- go through all emails in the inbox
- test these emails for whether or not they have attachments that meet
a specific filename pattern
- save any attachments that meet the pattern to a local drive
- permanently delete the email with said attachments, once the
attachments are saved

I'd like to know what would be the best (perhaps better expressed as
the easiest) way to do this?

Any help will be very appreciated!

Many thanks,

pt

 

[Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]]

Well, you could use WebDAV, but my guess is that using MAPI would be
easier. I know that MAPI will give you what you want, but I'm not familiar
enough with WebDAV to make the same claim about it.

Also, if I had to guess, I would say that you probably have more
functions available to you through MAPI than you do WebDAV, which might
facilitate what you are trying to do.

 

[planetthoughtful]

Well, you could use WebDAV, but my guess is that using MAPI would be
easier. I know that MAPI will give you what you want, but I'm not familiar
enough with WebDAV to make the same claim about it.

Also, if I had to guess, I would say that you probably have more
functions available to you through MAPI than you do WebDAV, which might
facilitate what you are trying to do.

Hi Nicholas,

Thanks for the advice! You aren't aware of any examples on the web of
achieving this, by any chance? MSDN isn't being very helpful (or, at
least isn't being helpful given the keywords I'm trying to use).

Many thanks again,

pt

 

[Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]]

Searching for "mapi sample exchange" on google will bring up a number of
results:

http://www.google.com/search?q=mapi+sample+exchange

You might also want to look at the MAPI API documentation (don't worry
that the page is blank, look on the tree on the left):

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms529058.aspx

Almost everything you find is not going to be tailored for .NET, so you
will have to use the P/Invoke layer to make the calls.