VB Forum / Win API / July 2008

Nothing about getting data out of OE is simple, I'm afraid.

Do you have access to your mail server logs?  That's another avenue.

So you want to grab the contents of the mail in the lower pane and parse out
the To and From names?  Is that right?

It is possible, but you really need to know your API and your DOM.

How much you willing to pay me to do it for you?  ;-)

- Kev

You're not getting the header lines when you
retrieve the HTML from the window?

 I'm using OE5, so I don't know if this is applicable
for you, but I see in Spy++ that there's an
InternetExplorer_Server class window for preview.
That's a browser and an IE instance can be returned
from it. I haven't tested to find out what the DOM
properties can extract from that browser, but I'm
guessing that it may be the same that shows in
right-click -> Properties -> Details -> Message Source.
If so, you could easily parse that to get the sender,
subject, etc. If the browser was replaced with a
RichEdit window in OE6 it may be that the header info.
is still there somewhere.

  If you don't find it by returning the browser DOM -
or the RTB text - you might try Active Accesibility.
There's an AA SDK which is very handy. It comes
with AccExplorer, which is sort of a Spy++ working
at a different level. It uses the AA functions to return
properties and content (such as text) from the various
parts of a window. AccExplorer can be handy for tracking
down exactly where the content you want is.

The following link may be helpful. It explains the OE5 dbx message
files.

http://www.wotsit.org/

When I started to explore this subject, Arne Schloh had a website
up and running with information about how the OE dbx files were
laid out.

The current link for the dbx files (which may change in the future)
is: http://www.wotsit.org/list.asp?al=D. They still use an IIS 5
server (or so it appears)!

You can set up a group-name to forward an email to everyone. OE works
pretty well in regards to mail forwarding, that way you do not have
to type in everyone's email address all over again, just send it to
a "group" email. Just do a search in OE's help file for the word "group".

And you can use OE to connect to Microsoft's news servers as well, as
opposed to using the google groups to post and review messages here.
Just create an account in OE with the msnews.microsoft.com as the news
server.

Arne Schloh's website is located here, http://oedbx.aroh.de/. Each
folder in OE gets a unique name and ends up as a .dbx file with a
like name. If the folders are not uniquely named, the .dbx files end
up with numbers appended to them.

Hope this helps.

The easiest method is to use MAPISession and MAPIMessages controls. Here is
a sample that can be used to extract the fields from the messages easily:

HOWTO: How to Send/Receive E-Mail Messages with Visual Basic
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/185171/en-us

If you have both Outlook and Outlook Express, it will get the messages from
the one that you made the default email program. Also, if you have thousands
of messages in your Inbox, when you connect; it could take few minutes and
CPU usage spikes to 100%. To avoid this, move most of the messages to a
custom folder. I am not sure if this can be sped up using the API.