Read from .msg files

Question

I need to read from Outlook .MSG file in .NET without using COM API for Outlook (cos it will not be installed on the machines that my app will run). Are there any free 3rd party libraries to do that? I want to extract From, To, CC and BCC fields. Sent/Receive date fields would be good if they are also stored in MSG files.

Solution 1

Update: I have found a 3rd party COM library called Outlook Redemption which is working fine for me at the moment. If you use it via COM-Interop in .NET, don't forget to release every COM object after you are done with it, otherwise your application crashes randomly.

Solution 2

There is code avaliable on CodeProject for reading .msg files without COM. See here.

Solution 3

Here's some sample VBA code using Outlook Redemption that Huseyint found.

Public Sub ProcessMail()

   Dim Sess As RDOSession
   Dim myMsg As RDOMail
   Dim myString As String

   Set Sess = CreateObject("Redemption.RDOSession")
   Set myMsg = Sess.GetMessageFromMsgFile("C:\TestHarness\kmail.msg")

   myString = myMsg.Body
   myMsg.Body = Replace(myString, "8750", "XXXX")

   myMsg.Save

End Sub

Solution 4

Microsoft has documented this: .MSG File Format Specification

Solution 5

It's a "Structured Storage" document. I've successfully used Andrew Peace's code to read these in the past, even under .NET (using C++/CLI) - it's clean and fairly easy to understand. Basically, you need to figure out which records you need, and query for those - it gets a little bit hairy, since different versions of Outlook and different types of messages will result in different records...

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