Develop Reference

C#: How to read Microsoft office emails. Different approaches

I need to read emails using C# (concrete task - count of received/sent emails by range).
Ideally, user enters credentials of his Microsoft Office/Exchange email on webpage and receive this info.
I see the following ways to implement it.
ExchangeService
using nuget package Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices we can get access to email profile, e.g.
ExchangeService _service;
_service = new ExchangeService(ExchangeVersion.Exchange2013_SP1)
{
Credentials = new WebCredentials("myemail#hotmail.com", "mypassword"),
};
_service.Url = new Uri("https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx");
_service.TraceEnabled = true;
_service.TraceFlags = TraceFlags.All;
var items = _service.FindItems(WellKnownFolderName.Inbox, searchFilter: new SearchFilter.IsGreaterThan(TaskSchema.DateTimeCreated, DateTime.Now.AddDays(-10)), new ItemView(int.MaxValue));
sometimes this approach works, but for some cases does not work (for example, if 2-way authentication is enabled)
using IAuthenticationProvider and Active Directory Tenant Id
there is a way to impement own IAuthenticationProvider with implementation AuthenticateRequestAsync like this
public async Task AuthenticateRequestAsync(HttpRequestMessage request)
{
var token = await GetTokenAsync();
request.Headers.Authorization = new AuthenticationHeaderValue(token.TokenType, token.AccessToken);
}
after this we can create GraphServiceClient like this:
GraphServiceClient graphServiceClient =
new GraphServiceClient(_authenticationProvider, _graphHttpProvider);
and can send email, for example:
await graphServiceClient.Users[fromAddress]
.SendMail(message, false)
.Request()
.PostAsync();
I suppose, similar way I can get access to folders also
For this approach, I assume, I need to get tenantId etc (I'm a little confused with it)
How to implement stable solution to read Microsoft Office/Exchange emails ?

I would avoid the first approach EWS is now legacy and in that example your using Basic Authentication which is depreciated and will be disabled in October this year (if it hasn't already been).
For 2 you need to create a Azure Application registration see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/use-the-api which has some detailed documentation and walkthroughs on how to do that. There's also https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/tutorials/aspnet-core which is a pretty good example of building a webapp that takes you through all the steps.

Sendgrid not finding any templates when using urlPath: "templates"

I am using Sendgrid and am trying to access my templates.
Normally code underneath should provide the response var with my templates
var client = GetSendGridClient();
var response = await client.RequestAsync(SendGrid.SendGridClient.Method.GET, urlPath: "templates");
However it seems sendgrid is not returning any templates.
I thought "templates" was the default urlpath for my templates
And yes I have active templates on my SendGrid account, and yes My Sendgrid Client is being succesfully created.

In the SendGrid C# Library documentation, they show:
string apiKey = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("NAME_OF_THE_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE_FOR_YOUR_SENDGRID_KEY");
var client = new SendGridClient(apiKey);
You have: var client = GetSendGridClient();. Since you're not providing the apiKey, you're probably not authenticating, so it's not returning any data. Have you made sure that the client instance you generate is authenticated or otherwise "logged in"?

in the end it seems that my code only works with Legacy Templates and not the standard transactional. After creating a Legacy template SendGrid managed to find the templates.

To create a transaction template (none legacy type) add "generation": "dynamic" to the JSON when POSTing. For example.
{
"name": "my_template",
"generation": "dynamic"
}
NB: This appears to be an undocumented feature.!!

How to read inbox Outlook.com mails from WinForms?

SCENARIO
I would like to develop a very simple app written in C# or Vb.Net using WinForms tech., that will help me to automate a simple task that consist in access to my Outlook.com account to read my emails received from Youtube then extract the video urls.
PROBLEM
My networking related knowledges are not good, I'm stuck at the most important point trying to find the easiest way to acchieve that task (I mean official Microsoft APIs for .Net or 3rd party APIs or other way to be able do this), trying to apply the required OAuth2 autorizathion to access the email account.
I know that the following code is not focused in the right direction because the lack of authorization, but I don't know how to implement that neither how to read the emails, so this is what I tried:
string url = "https://outlook.office.com/api/v2.0/me/messages";
string result = "";
HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
req.Method = "GET";
try {
using (WebClient wc = new WebClient()) {
wc.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
result = wc.DownloadString(url);
}
} catch (Exception ex) {
MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);
}
QUESTION
How I could access to my Outlook.com account to read the title and the content of the inbox emails that I have?. And, additionally but optionally to respond (only if possible and is not too much ask), how I could delete a email?.
Note that this question reffers to Outlook.com online service, not to Outlook's desktop client neither the usage of their COM libraries or Office365.
ANSWER REQUISITES
I know that I'm no one to ask for help and put some requisites, all kind of help is appreciated for me, but this time I need to put a special requisite, because my head got crazy trying to understand, use and adapt OAuth2 solutions that were made from scratch, it generates very long codes that I don't understand at all, it's too much for me.
For that reason, I will accept an answer in this question only if the provided solution is based in the usage of a 3rd pary library that will facilitate all this task because it will serve as a complete abstraction of the OAuth2 implementation, like RestSharp, CodeScales or DotNetOpenAuth, or whichever other (free)lib that will handle the required things for me instead of the need to develop the OAuth2 algorithms by myself from scratch.
RESEARCH
My investigation started reading this Microsoft's Outlook dev. page, following to this Mail API reference, this REST API documentation, this Outlook.com API, this kind of getting started article, and ending in this fully illustrative example using ASP.Net.
What I have taken in clear from the Microsoft articles is just... nothing of nothing, I've registered the app and created the client id and the secret, but Microsoft does not provide any example for Winforms so I tried to translate their official ASP.NET example to WinForms without success.
After that waste of time, I found this OAuth documentation page which provides some libraries for .NET that I imagine will facilitate the OAuth2 authorization, then I discovered the DotNetOpenAuth library which seems very complete, and also I found this code sample for Outlook using DotNetOpenAuth but again it is for ASP.NET, and also these generic and official DotNetOpenAuth's code samples but I can't find any thing that could help me for what I want to do.

The general idea is to follow the tutorial here: Get Started with Mail, Calendar, and Contacts REST APIs but I will try to simplify it and demonstrate it with a Winforms sample.
Register App
First things first, you need to create and register an application to the Application Registration Portal (you should only have to do this once for a given application of course):
create an app
generate a new password
add a platform, and choose mobile ("mobile" here means "any device", or "not for a browser"...)
don't forget to click on save!
Authentication
Now, in your "any device" code (including winforms), you'll need to authenticate. The simplest way is to use ADAL ("Active Directory Authentication Library"). The source is available here https://github.com/AzureAD/azure-activedirectory-library-for-dotnet and the binary is available as a nuget.
Unfortunately, the latest version which you can get on nuget today named Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory does not work for me (It had a bug I've reported here https://github.com/AzureAD/azure-activedirectory-library-for-dotnet/issues/412 that's already been fixed, but now the server complains about some app vs server incompatibility).
So you must use the old "Experimental" one (keep that in mind as someday in the future, we'll have to switch): Microsoft.Experimental.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory
You want to make sure you use the proper scopes when you do acquire an auth token. Scopes are defined here: Outlook mail, calendar, and contacts scopes and represent an area of permission. Without specifying scope, you can do nothing else but authenticate.
So, if you want to read mails, use the "https://outlook.office.com/mail.read" scope.
When you try the application, after the authentication dialog, it should display to the user the consent screen (here we see we asked for mail scope: "Read Your Mail"):
Office/Outlook/OData API
Once authentication works, you can use the REST api directly which is not that easy, or be lazy and use another package: Microsoft.Office365.OutlookServices-V2.0 that will do all underlying REST/OData magic for you. The good news is this API is quite complete so it should allow you to do other things like, message creation, delete, etc.
There is an important remark for the outlook.com case: not all accounts are enabled for this whole REST API (check the "REST API availability" chapter here: Outlook Mail), so you might want to create a new one for testing.
Here is the winforms code for a sample app that will query 10 messages and add them to a listbox.
using System;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using Microsoft.Experimental.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory;
using Microsoft.Office365.OutlookServices;
namespace WindowsFormsApplication1
{
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
private const string authority = "https://login.microsoftonline.com/common";
private const string clientId = "blablabl-abla-blab-abla-blablablab"; // TODO: put your application id here
private const string redirectUri = "urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob"; // put your redirect uri here (should be the same)
// we cache the token for the duration of this form
// you could/should use the FileCache class provided in the sample here https://dev.outlook.com/restapi/tutorial/dotnet
private TokenCache _cache = new TokenCache();
public Form1()
{
InitializeComponent();
}
private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
// since all packages force async,
// we have to avoid threading issues
BeginInvoke((Action)(() => GetMessages()));
}
private async void GetMessages()
{
// use the Microsoft.Experimental.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory nuget package for auth
var authContext = new AuthenticationContext(authority, _cache);
var result = await authContext.AcquireTokenAsync(
new[] { "https://outlook.office.com/mail.read" },
null,
clientId,
new Uri(redirectUri),
new PlatformParameters(PromptBehavior.Always, this));
// use the Microsoft.Office365.OutlookServices-V2.0 nuget package from now on
var client = new OutlookServicesClient(new Uri("https://outlook.office.com/api/v2.0"), () => Task.FromResult(result.Token));
var messages = await client.Me.Messages
.Take(10) // get only 10 messages
.ExecuteAsync();
// fill some list box
// (beware, some messages have a null subject)
foreach (var msg in messages.CurrentPage)
{
listBox1.Items.Add(msg.Subject);
}
}
}
}

I just would like to share the (almost)final solution, I extended a little bit the solution provided by #Simon Mourier, to iterate all the emails of a specific folder and, if the email is from Youtube, scrap the urls inside, then recytle the email.
When to apply this?, well, just adapt it for any case on which you need to parse the emails, my case is very specific, I have around 500 channel subscriptions so I accumulate around 200 emais from Youtube in a month, most of the emails are from music channels that I just read the email to copy the url to download it with JDownloader, so this is usefull as a savetimer because it will do all the task for me.
Private Const Authority As String = "https://login.microsoftonline.com/common"
Private Const ClientId As String = "OUR API ID"
' Put your redirect uri here (should be the same).
Private Const RedirectUri As String = "urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob"
' We cache the token for the duration of this Form.
' You could/should use the FileCache class provided in the sample here:
' https://dev.outlook.com/restapi/tutorial/dotnet
Private cache As New TokenCache()
Private Sub Form1_Shown() Handles MyBase.Shown
' Since all packages force async, we have to avoid threading issues.
Me.BeginInvoke(Sub() GetMessages())
End Sub
Private Async Sub GetMessages()
' Use the 'Microsoft.Experimental.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory' Nuget package for auth.
Dim authContext As New AuthenticationContext(Authority, cache)
Dim result As AuthenticationResult =
Await authContext.AcquireTokenAsync({"https://outlook.office.com/mail.readwrite"},
Nothing, ClientId, New Uri(RedirectUri),
New PlatformParameters(PromptBehavior.Auto, Me))
' Use the 'Microsoft.Office365.OutlookServices-V2.0' Nuget package from now on.
Dim client As New OutlookServicesClient(New Uri("https://outlook.office.com/api/v2.0"),
Function() Task.FromResult(result.Token))
' I have a rule set to automatically move all emails received from Youtube to a folder with name "Youtube".
Dim folder As IMailFolder =
Await client.[Me].MailFolders.Where(Function(f As IMailFolder) f.DisplayName = "Youtube").ExecuteSingleAsync()
Dim messages As IPagedCollection(Of IMessage) =
Await client.[Me].MailFolders.GetById(folder.Id).Messages.ExecuteAsync()
Do While True
Me.ParseYoutubeMessages(messages.CurrentPage)
If messages.MorePagesAvailable Then
messages = Await messages.GetNextPageAsync
Else
Exit Do
End If
Loop
End Sub
Private Async Sub ParseYoutubeMessages(ByVal messageList As IReadOnlyList(Of IMessage))
Dim urlRegex As New Regex("""http://www.youtube.com/.+watch.+uploademail""", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase)
For Each msg As IMessage In messageList
If (msg.From.EmailAddress.Name.Equals("YouTube", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) Then
Dim body As String = msg.Body.Content
Dim isMatch As Boolean = urlRegex.IsMatch(body)
If Not (isMatch) Then
Throw New InvalidOperationException("Youtube url regex doesn't match.")
Else
Dim urlMatches As MatchCollection = urlRegex.Matches(body)
Dim urls As String() =
(From m As Match In urlMatches.Cast(Of Match)
Select Environment.NewLine & m.Value).Distinct().ToArray()
File.AppendAllText("C:\Youtube Urls.txt", String.Join("", urls))
msg.IsRead = True
Await msg.MoveAsync("DeletedItems")
End If
End If
Next msg
End Sub

Updating this for 2018 -- Microsoft Graph API now has control over granting access to objects in the 365 world, including email. See this link for the 4-step overview: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/docs/concepts/auth_v2_user

User Master Account to send SMS on behalf of a Sub Account

I'm developing a feature for our product that will allow users to send SMS messages via Twilio and we handle all of the account issues. We have our Master Account and all of our customers will be sub accounts under us.
In an effort to not have to keep track of 1000+ auth tokens, we decided to use our Master Account credentials to send the SMS message however we still want it to roll up under the sub account. According to Twilio, this shouldn't be an issue.
My problem is that there is very little (that I've found) documentation for the c# library they provide. I'm not sure if what I've done is the correct way to accomplish what I described above and since I'm on a trial account until the project is finished and can be rolled out to production I have no way of testing.
var twilio = new TwilioRestClient("Master SID", "Master Auth Token");
var response = twilio.SendSmsMessage(sender, recipient.ConvertToE164Format(), message, null, "Subaccount SID");
The comment on this overload isn't really clear on if passing the subaccounts SID here will send the message as if I had logged into their account and sent it.
// applicationSid:
// Twilio will POST SmsSid as well as SmsStatus=sent or SmsStatus=failed to
// the URL in the SmsStatusCallback property of this Application. If the StatusCallback
// parameter above is also passed, the Application's SmsStatusCallback parameter
// will take precedence.
The callback url will be the same across all accounts so I don't need/care about that value.
Short Version:
If I log in with my Master Account details but pass the subaccount SID in the SendSmsMessage() method, which account does the message come from?

Twilio support finally got back to me and confirmed my fears that this wouldn't work. I do have to pull the subaccount information down and reinstantiate the twilioRestClient with the new credentials which I was hoping I could get away with not doing. Just a few extra lines.
var twilio = new TwilioRestClient("Master SID", "Master Auth Token");
var subAccount = twilio.GetAccount("SubAccount SID");
var subAccountClient = new TwilioRestClient(subAccount.Sid, subAccount.AuthToken);
var response = subAccountClient.SendSmsMessage(sender, recipient.ConvertToE164Format(), message);
return response.Sid;

Accessing older GData APIs (Spreadsheet API) using OAuth 2 and a service account

The short question is whether is this possible and if so, how?
Outline
I have a .NET application which currently uses a service account to access information across a Google Apps domain using the Google Drive API. This works fine using the google-api-dotnet-client library and code along the same lines as shown in the samples here - which are currently a very good basic example of what I'm doing.
What I want to do now is extend it so as well as using those APIs provided by the "new" google-api-dotnet-client library, it uses the older "GData" libraries, as provided for via the
older google-gdata library, specifically the Spreadsheets API (and perhaps more to come).
The Problem
This is where the difficulty arises. The former library does exactly what I want, as evidenced by the second link in the first paragraph above - and the fact I have it doing it myself. HOWEVER... although the second library has been updated to support OAuth 2.0 in addition to OAuth 1.0 and the other older auth techniques, it does not - as far as I can tell from extensive Googling and trail-and-error - allow the "service account on behalf of all my users" operation which I need.
My question is whether I'm missing something (possibly a hard to find or undocumented something) which would allow me to do what I want. Failing that, is there any way I could force this behaviour and make these two libraries operate side by side?
The ideal solution
Ideally I would love some way of having the Google.GData.Spreadsheets.SpreadsheetsService instance be able to take advantage of the Google.Apis.Authentication.Auth2Authenticator<AssertionFlowClient> instance I'm already using... somehow. Is such witchcraft possible? I'm I missing the obvious?
Failing that, I'm happy to do the whole OAuth2 "assertion flow client" dance again if I have to, in some way that the older library can handle.
Help?
Other Thoughts
I have considered - and rejected for the time being - the option of starting from scratch and writing my own library to make this happen. This is for two reasons:
The gdata library already exists, and has been developed by many people likely cleverer than myself. I'm not so arrogant that I believe I can do better.
I'm not certain the OAuth2 with service account approach is even supported/allowed on these older APIs.
An alternate approach which I've been hoping to avoid but may have to fall back to depending on the answers here will be to use 2-legged OAuth 1.0 for portions of this. I'd prefer not to, as having parts of the app rely on one old auth method whilst other parts do it the nice new way just feels wrong to me. And there's that much more to go wrong...
Updates
I have considered the possibility of subclassing GDataRequestFactory and GDataRequest so I can make my own request factory and have that take the instance of Google.Apis.Authentication.Auth2Authenticator<AssertionFlowClient> (well, an instance of Google.Apis.Authentication.IAuthenticator anyway) which could step in to authenticate the request just before it's called. However... the constructor for GDataRequest is internal, which has stopped me.
It's really looking like this isn't meant to be.

For the sake of other folks coming across this question (now that the solution linked to in the accepted answer uses deprecated code), here's how I solved it:
First, start in "new API" land (use the Google.Apis.Auth nuget package) by setting up a ServiceAccountCredential following Google's Service Account example:
//In the old api, this accessed the main api accounts' sheets, not anymore
//** Important ** share spreadsheets with the Service Account by inviting the "serviceAccountEmail" address to the sheet
string serviceAccountEmail = "12345697-abcdefghijklmnop#developer.gserviceaccount.com";
var certificate = new X509Certificate2(#"key.p12", "notasecret", X509KeyStorageFlags.Exportable);
ServiceAccountCredential credential = new ServiceAccountCredential(
new ServiceAccountCredential.Initializer(serviceAccountEmail)
{
Scopes = new[] { "https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds", "https://docs.google.com/feeds" }
}.FromCertificate(certificate));
Tell the credential to request an Access Token:
credential.RequestAccessTokenAsync(System.Threading.CancellationToken.None).Wait();
Now it's time to switch back to "old API" land (use the Google.GData.Spreadsheets nuget package). Start by constructing the SpreadsheetsService (similar to Google's example):
SpreadsheetsService service = new SpreadsheetsService("MySpreadsheetIntegration-v1");
To use Service Account authentication, we'll create an instance of the GDataRequestFactory and set a custom Authorization header:
var requestFactory = new GDataRequestFactory("My App User Agent");
requestFactory.CustomHeaders.Add(string.Format("Authorization: Bearer {0}", credential.Token.AccessToken));
Finally, set the SpreadsheetsService's RequestFactory property to this new factory:
service.RequestFactory = requestFactory;
And go ahead and use the SpreadsheetsService as you would had you authenticated using any other technique. (Tip: share spreadsheets with the Service Account by inviting the serviceAccountEmail address to the sheet)

I managed to solve this by subclassing GDataRequestFactory and creating my own implementation of the interfaces implemented by GDataRequest. This implementation wraps an instance of GDataRequest instantiated via reflection, and adds in the necessary code to perform authentication using an instance of IAuthenticator (in my case, Auth2Authenticator).
I wrote a blog post on it and added an example as a Gist:
Blog: Using Google's Spreadsheet API using .NET, OAuth 2.0 and a Service Account
Gist 4244834
Feel free to use this if it helps you (BSD licence).

Hey just stumbled accross the same problem and produced a different solution:
Has anybody ever concidered of writing the parameters from the credentials-object directly to an OAuth2Parameters-Object?
I did this and it worked nicely:
public class OAuthTest
{
OAuth2Parameters param = new OAuth2Parameters();
public OAuthTest()
{
Debug.WriteLine("Calling: AuthGoogleDataInterface()");
bool init = AuthGoogleDataInterface();
if (init)
{
GOAuth2RequestFactory requestFactory = new GOAuth2RequestFactory(null, "My App User Agent", this.param);
//requestFactory.CustomHeaders.Add(string.Format("Authorization: Bearer {0}", credential.Token.AccessToken));
var service = new SpreadsheetsService("MyService");
service.RequestFactory = requestFactory;
SpreadsheetQuery query = new SpreadsheetQuery();
// Make a request to the API and get all spreadsheets.
SpreadsheetFeed feed = service.Query(query);
// Iterate through all of the spreadsheets returned
foreach (SpreadsheetEntry entry in feed.Entries)
{
// Print the title of this spreadsheet to the screen
Debug.WriteLine(entry.Title.Text);
}
}
Debug.WriteLine(m_Init);
}
private bool AuthGoogleDataInterface()
{
bool b_success;
try
{
Console.WriteLine("New User Credential");
// New User Credential
UserCredential credential;
using (var stream = new FileStream("client_secrets.json", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read))
{
GoogleClientSecrets GCSecrets = GoogleClientSecrets.Load(stream);
string[] ArrScope = new[] { "https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds", "https://docs.google.com/feeds" };
credential = GoogleWebAuthorizationBroker.AuthorizeAsync(
GCSecrets.Secrets,
ArrScope,
"user", CancellationToken.None,
new FileDataStore("My.cal")).Result;
// put the Information generated for the credentials object into the OAuth2Parameters-Object to access the Spreadsheets
this.param.ClientId = GCSecrets.Secrets.ClientId; //CLIENT_ID;
this.param.ClientSecret = GCSecrets.Secrets.ClientSecret; //CLIENT_SECRET;
this.param.RedirectUri = "urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob"; //REDIRECT_URI;
this.param.Scope = ArrScope.ToString();
this.param.AccessToken = credential.Token.AccessToken;
this.param.RefreshToken = credential.Token.RefreshToken;
}
Debug.WriteLine("AuthGoogleDataInterface: Success");
b_success = true;
}
catch (Exception e)
{
Debug.WriteLine(e.ToString());
b_success = false;
}
return b_success;
}
}