How to get the "Date" of an email?

Question

I create an application that gets email from mail server. I use "System.Net.Mail.MailMessage" for receive email. Now I want to get "Date and Time" of each email that ins in Inbox.

Solution 1

You will want to look at the emails headers here is some documentation

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.mail.mailmessage.headers.aspx

message.Headers["Date"];

Solution 2

I inspected the MailMessageObject and found this:

  Headers=HeaderCollection(5) 
  {
    "Uid",
    "DateCreated",
    "DateReceived",
    "Date",
    "IsRead"

So that means you have a total of three options available to you. The output will be in string format.

message.Headers["DateCreated"];
message.Headers["DateReceived"];
message.Headers["Date"];

Comments

[Johnny_D]

This headers means to be just a string in rather specific format, is parsing it manually the best practice to get the date?

[Micah Armantrout]

Yes this is going to come back as a string and then you will need to use datetime.parse

[aruno]

watch out - DateTime.Parse won't always be able to parse certain dates that may come back in headers : eg. "Tue, 20 Jun 2017 18:51:10 +0000 (UTC)"