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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.
There is code avaliable on CodeProject for reading .msg files without COM. See here.
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.
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
Microsoft has documented this: .MSG File Format Specification
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...
You can try our (commercial) Rebex Secure Mail library. It can read Outlooks MSG format. Following code shows how:
// Load message
MailMessage message = new MailMessage();
message.Load(#"c:\Temp\t\message.msg");
// show From, To and Sent date
Console.WriteLine("From: {0}", message.From);
Console.WriteLine("To: {0}", message.To);
Console.WriteLine("Sent: {0}", message.Date.LocalTime);
// find and try to parse the first 'Received' header
MailDateTime receivedDate = null;
string received = message.Headers.GetRaw("Received");
if (received != null)
{
int lastSemicolon = received.LastIndexOf(';');
if (lastSemicolon >= 0)
{
string rawDate = received.Substring(lastSemicolon + 1);
MimeHeader header = new MimeHeader("Date", rawDate);
receivedDate = header.Value as MailDateTime;
}
}
// display the received date if available
if (receivedDate != null)
Console.WriteLine("Received: {0}", receivedDate.LocalTime);
More info on Sent and Received dates and how are they represented in the message can be found at http://forum.rebex.net/questions/816/extract-senttime-receivetime-and-time-zones
If you open the .MSG file in a text editor, i believe you will find that the information you are after is stored as plain text inside the file. (It is on all the messages i have checked at least)
It would be pretty easy to write some code to parse the file looking for lines beginning with "From:" or "To:" etc. and then extracting the information you need.
If you need the body of the email as well, that may be a bit more complicated.
Related
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I am looking for a method of reading emails using Pop3 in C# 2.0. Currently, I am using code found in CodeProject. However, this solution is less than ideal. The biggest problem is that it doesn't support emails written in unicode.
I've successfully used OpenPop.NET to access emails via POP3.
downloading the email via the POP3 protocol is the easy part of the task. The protocol is quite simple and the only hard part could be advanced authentication methods if you don't want to send a clear text password over the network (and cannot use the SSL encrypted communication channel). See RFC 1939: Post Office Protocol - Version 3
and RFC 1734: POP3 AUTHentication command for details.
The hard part comes when you have to parse the received email, which means parsing MIME format in most cases. You can write quick&dirty MIME parser in a few hours or days and it will handle 95+% of all incoming messages. Improving the parser so it can parse almost any email means:
getting email samples sent from the most popular mail clients and improve the parser in order to fix errors and RFC misinterpretations generated by them.
Making sure that messages violating RFC for message headers and content will not crash your parser and that you will be able to read every readable or guessable value from the mangled email
correct handling of internationalization issues (e.g. languages written from righ to left, correct encoding for specific language etc)
UNICODE
Attachments and hierarchical message item tree as seen in "Mime torture email sample"
S/MIME (signed and encrypted emails).
and so on
Debugging a robust MIME parser takes months of work. I know, because I was watching my friend writing one such parser for the component mentioned below and was writing a few unit tests for it too ;-)
Back to the original question.
Following code taken from our POP3 Tutorial page and links would help you:
//
// create client, connect and log in
Pop3 client = new Pop3();
client.Connect("pop3.example.org");
client.Login("username", "password");
// get message list
Pop3MessageCollection list = client.GetMessageList();
if (list.Count == 0)
{
Console.WriteLine("There are no messages in the mailbox.");
}
else
{
// download the first message
MailMessage message = client.GetMailMessage(list[0].SequenceNumber);
...
}
client.Disconnect();
HOWTO: Download emails from a GMail account in C# (blogpost)
Rebex Mail for .NET (POP3/IMAP client component for .NET)
Rebex Secure Mail for .NET (POP3/IMAP client component for .NET - SSL enabled)
My open source application BugTracker.NET includes a POP3 client that can parse MIME. Both the POP3 code and the MIME code are from other authors, but you can see how it all fits together in my app.
For the MIME parsing, I use http://anmar.eu.org/projects/sharpmimetools/.
See the file POP3Main.cs, POP3Client.cs, and insert_bug.aspx
You can also try Mail.dll mail component, it has SSL support, unicode, and multi-national email support:
using(Pop3 pop3 = new Pop3())
{
pop3.Connect("mail.host.com"); // Connect to server and login
pop3.Login("user", "password");
foreach(string uid in pop3.GetAll())
{
IMail email = new MailBuilder()
.CreateFromEml(pop3.GetMessageByUID(uid));
Console.WriteLine( email.Subject );
}
pop3.Close(false);
}
You can download it here at https://www.limilabs.com/mail
Please note that this is a commercial product I've created.
call me old fashion but why use a 3rd party library for a simple protocol. I've implemented POP3 readers in web based ASP.NET application with System.Net.Sockets.TCPClient and System.Net.Security.SslStream for the encryption and authentication. As far as protocols go, once you open up communication with the POP3 server, there are only a handful of commands that you have to deal with. It is a very easy protocol to work with.
I wouldn't recommend OpenPOP. I just spent a few hours debugging an issue - OpenPOP's POPClient.GetMessage() was mysteriously returning null. I debugged this and found it was a string index bug - see the patch I submitted here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2833334&group_id=92166&atid=599778. It was difficult to find the cause since there are empty catch{} blocks that swallow exceptions.
Also, the project is mostly dormant... the last release was in 2004.
For now we're still using OpenPOP, but I'll take a look at some of the other projects people have recommended here.
HigLabo.Mail is easy to use. Here is a sample usage:
using (Pop3Client cl = new Pop3Client())
{
cl.UserName = "MyUserName";
cl.Password = "MyPassword";
cl.ServerName = "MyServer";
cl.AuthenticateMode = Pop3AuthenticateMode.Pop;
cl.Ssl = false;
cl.Authenticate();
///Get first mail of my mailbox
Pop3Message mg = cl.GetMessage(1);
String MyText = mg.BodyText;
///If the message have one attachment
Pop3Content ct = mg.Contents[0];
///you can save it to local disk
ct.DecodeData("your file path");
}
you can get it from https://github.com/higty/higlabo or Nuget [HigLabo]
I just tried SMTPop and it worked.
I downloaded this.
Added smtpop.dll reference to my C# .NET project
Wrote the following code:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using SmtPop;
namespace SMT_POP3 {
class Program {
static void Main(string[] args) {
SmtPop.POP3Client pop = new SmtPop.POP3Client();
pop.Open("<hostURL>", 110, "<username>", "<password>");
// Get message list from POP server
SmtPop.POPMessageId[] messages = pop.GetMailList();
if (messages != null) {
// Walk attachment list
foreach(SmtPop.POPMessageId id in messages) {
SmtPop.POPReader reader= pop.GetMailReader(id);
SmtPop.MimeMessage msg = new SmtPop.MimeMessage();
// Read message
msg.Read(reader);
if (msg.AddressFrom != null) {
String from= msg.AddressFrom[0].Name;
Console.WriteLine("from: " + from);
}
if (msg.Subject != null) {
String subject = msg.Subject;
Console.WriteLine("subject: "+ subject);
}
if (msg.Body != null) {
String body = msg.Body;
Console.WriteLine("body: " + body);
}
if (msg.Attachments != null && false) {
// Do something with first attachment
SmtPop.MimeAttachment attach = msg.Attachments[0];
if (attach.Filename == "data") {
// Read data from attachment
Byte[] b = Convert.FromBase64String(attach.Body);
System.IO.MemoryStream mem = new System.IO.MemoryStream(b, false);
//BinaryFormatter f = new BinaryFormatter();
// DataClass data= (DataClass)f.Deserialize(mem);
mem.Close();
}
// Delete message
// pop.Dele(id.Id);
}
}
}
pop.Quit();
}
}
}
I need help with converting EML to MSG, using the Exchange web service (EWS) in a Outlook Web Add-In. When i create an EML file from the MimeContent (EmailMessage.MimeContent.Content), the file output looks bad, some tags are not convert currently.
The files open good just from Windows mail app, but from Ooutlook(2016) looks bad.
I tried to find some solution from Microsoft and found this Independentsoft, a third party solution, and it is work great. the file looks good while the format is MSG. but it is to expansive licence solution for the customer (used 30 days demo).
This is what i used and work well, and try to found something like this:
//1.This code use the EWS mimeContent(the message on bytes - eml format)
//2.Create Independentsoft message object
//Independentsoft.Msg.Message constractor do the convert by
// making an msg object from an eml object.
//3. save the msg file.
Independentsoft.Email.Mime.Message mimeMessage = new Independentsoft.Email.Mime.Message(emailMessage.MimeContent.Content);
Independentsoft.Msg.Message msgMessage = Independentsoft.Msg.Message(mimeMessage);
using (MemoryStream memStream = new MemoryStream(emailMessage.MimeContent.Content.Length))
{
Directory.CreateDirectory(TempMsgDirectory);
msgMessage.Save(TempMsgDirectory + "mail.msg", true);
}
I am not aware of any Outlook problems with displaying EML files. It uses the same EML parser used to parse incoming POP3/IMAP4 messages. Please post a specific EML file that Outlook does not display correctly.
As for converting EML files to MSG, you can also use Redemption (I am its author) and its RDOSession.CreateMessageFromMsgFIle and RDOMail.Import methods. Just keep in mind that it requires the MAPI system to be present to function properly, which means Outlook must be installed locally.
Off the top of my head:
RDOSession session = new RDOSession();
RDOMail msg = session.CreateMessageFromMsgFile(TempMsgDirectory + "mail.msg");
msg.Import(TempMsgDirectory + "YouEmlFile.eml", rdoSaveAsType.olRFC822);
msg.Save();
Also keep in mind that retrieving MIME content from Exchange might not be the best idea - you will lose all MAPI specific properties and will end up with a corrupted message if the original was in the RTF format (with or without embedded OLE objects). In that case, you can use ExportItems EWS operation. Its format is not documented, but it is very close to the MSG format, and you can convert it to MSG using code similar to that above, but specifying olFTS format instead of olRFC822.
I'm trying to do a conversion from .msg files into .txt. I have two questions.
1)I've been investigating and found the Microsoft.Interop Outlook package and there is a way where I can extract the bodyHTML, To, Sent Date, and a few other properties but I feel as if this is a very manual process because I have to trim out all the html tags such as < br>,  , a href etc...
Here is my current code...
MailItem mailItem = outlookApp.Session.OpenSharedItem(item) as MailItem;
TextFile textFile = new TextFile(); //collection of properties I am interested in
textFile.To = mailItem.To;
textFile.Subject = mailItem.Subject;
textFile.Sent = mailItem.SentOn.ToString();
textFile.Name = Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(item);
var atttach = mailItem.Attachments; //Really just want the names
textFile.Body = RemoveStuff(mailItem.HTMLBody); //manually removing all html tags
textFiles.Add(textFile);
Marshal.ReleaseComObject(mailItem);
Does anyone know if there is a more effective way to do this in C# or a way using Interop that I am not aware of?
2)If I go the interop route, is there a way I can bypass the popup in Outlook asking if I can allow access to Outlook? Seems inefficient if my goal is to create a converter.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Firstly, why are you using HTMLBody property instead of the plain text Body?
Secondly, you can use MailItem.SaveAs(..., olTxt) to save the message as a text file. Or do you mean something else by txt file?
The security prompt is raised by Outlook if your antivirus app is not up to date. If you cannot control the environment where your code runs, Extended MAPI (C++ or Delphi only) or a wrapper like Redemption (any language - I am its author) are pretty much your only option. See http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=52 for more details.
In Redemption, you can have something like the following:
using Redemption;
...
RDOSession session = new RDOSession();
RDOMail msg = session.GetMessageFromMsgFile(TheFileName);
msg.SaveAs(TxtFileName, rdoSaveAsType.olTXT);
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I am trying to save a PDF file by saving the data from the FDF into a PDFTemplate, in my WPF application.
So, the situation is like this. I have a PDFTemplate.pdf which serves as a template and has placeholders (or fields). Now I generate this FDF file pro-grammatically, which in turn contain all the field names required for the PDFTemplate to be filled in. Also, this FDF contains the file path for the PDFTemaplte also, so that on opening, it knows which PDF to use.
Now, when try and double click on the FDF, it open the Adober Acrobat Reader and displays the PDFTemplate with the data filled in. But I can't save this file using the File menu, as it says this file will be saved without the data.
I would like to know if it is possible to import the FDF data into PDF and save it without using a thrid party component.
Also, if it is very difficult to do this, what would be the possible solution in terms of a free library that would be able to do it?
I just realized that iTextSharp is not free for commercial applications.
I have been able to achieve this using another library PDFSharp.
It is somewhat similar to how iTextSharp works except for some places where in iTextSharp is better and easier to use. I am posting the code in case someone would want to do something similar:
//Create a copy of the original PDF file from source
//to the destination location
File.Copy(formLocation, outputFileNameAndPath, true);
//Open the newly created PDF file
using (var pdfDoc = PdfSharp.Pdf.IO.PdfReader.Open(
outputFileNameAndPath,
PdfSharp.Pdf.IO.PdfDocumentOpenMode.Modify))
{
//Get the fields from the PDF into which the data
//is supposed to be inserted
var pdfFields = pdfDoc.AcroForm.Fields;
//To allow appearance of the fields
if (pdfDoc.AcroForm.Elements.ContainsKey("/NeedAppearances") == false)
{
pdfDoc.AcroForm.Elements.Add(
"/NeedAppearances",
new PdfSharp.Pdf.PdfBoolean(true));
}
else
{
pdfDoc.AcroForm.Elements["/NeedAppearances"] =
new PdfSharp.Pdf.PdfBoolean(true);
}
//To set the readonly flags for fields to their original values
bool flag = false;
//Iterate through the fields from PDF
for (int i = 0; i < pdfFields.Count(); i++)
{
try
{
//Get the current PDF field
var pdfField = pdfFields[i];
flag = pdfField.ReadOnly;
//Check if it is readonly and make it false
if (pdfField.ReadOnly)
{
pdfField.ReadOnly = false;
}
pdfField.Value = new PdfSharp.Pdf.PdfString(
fdfDataDictionary.Where(
p => p.Key == pdfField.Name)
.FirstOrDefault().Value);
//Set the Readonly flag back to the field
pdfField.ReadOnly = flag;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
throw new Exception(ERROR_FILE_WRITE_FAILURE + ex.Message);
}
}
//Save the PDF to the output destination
pdfDoc.Save(outputFileNameAndPath);
pdfDoc.Close();
}
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I am looking for a method of reading emails using Pop3 in C# 2.0. Currently, I am using code found in CodeProject. However, this solution is less than ideal. The biggest problem is that it doesn't support emails written in unicode.
I've successfully used OpenPop.NET to access emails via POP3.
downloading the email via the POP3 protocol is the easy part of the task. The protocol is quite simple and the only hard part could be advanced authentication methods if you don't want to send a clear text password over the network (and cannot use the SSL encrypted communication channel). See RFC 1939: Post Office Protocol - Version 3
and RFC 1734: POP3 AUTHentication command for details.
The hard part comes when you have to parse the received email, which means parsing MIME format in most cases. You can write quick&dirty MIME parser in a few hours or days and it will handle 95+% of all incoming messages. Improving the parser so it can parse almost any email means:
getting email samples sent from the most popular mail clients and improve the parser in order to fix errors and RFC misinterpretations generated by them.
Making sure that messages violating RFC for message headers and content will not crash your parser and that you will be able to read every readable or guessable value from the mangled email
correct handling of internationalization issues (e.g. languages written from righ to left, correct encoding for specific language etc)
UNICODE
Attachments and hierarchical message item tree as seen in "Mime torture email sample"
S/MIME (signed and encrypted emails).
and so on
Debugging a robust MIME parser takes months of work. I know, because I was watching my friend writing one such parser for the component mentioned below and was writing a few unit tests for it too ;-)
Back to the original question.
Following code taken from our POP3 Tutorial page and links would help you:
//
// create client, connect and log in
Pop3 client = new Pop3();
client.Connect("pop3.example.org");
client.Login("username", "password");
// get message list
Pop3MessageCollection list = client.GetMessageList();
if (list.Count == 0)
{
Console.WriteLine("There are no messages in the mailbox.");
}
else
{
// download the first message
MailMessage message = client.GetMailMessage(list[0].SequenceNumber);
...
}
client.Disconnect();
HOWTO: Download emails from a GMail account in C# (blogpost)
Rebex Mail for .NET (POP3/IMAP client component for .NET)
Rebex Secure Mail for .NET (POP3/IMAP client component for .NET - SSL enabled)
My open source application BugTracker.NET includes a POP3 client that can parse MIME. Both the POP3 code and the MIME code are from other authors, but you can see how it all fits together in my app.
For the MIME parsing, I use http://anmar.eu.org/projects/sharpmimetools/.
See the file POP3Main.cs, POP3Client.cs, and insert_bug.aspx
You can also try Mail.dll mail component, it has SSL support, unicode, and multi-national email support:
using(Pop3 pop3 = new Pop3())
{
pop3.Connect("mail.host.com"); // Connect to server and login
pop3.Login("user", "password");
foreach(string uid in pop3.GetAll())
{
IMail email = new MailBuilder()
.CreateFromEml(pop3.GetMessageByUID(uid));
Console.WriteLine( email.Subject );
}
pop3.Close(false);
}
You can download it here at https://www.limilabs.com/mail
Please note that this is a commercial product I've created.
call me old fashion but why use a 3rd party library for a simple protocol. I've implemented POP3 readers in web based ASP.NET application with System.Net.Sockets.TCPClient and System.Net.Security.SslStream for the encryption and authentication. As far as protocols go, once you open up communication with the POP3 server, there are only a handful of commands that you have to deal with. It is a very easy protocol to work with.
I wouldn't recommend OpenPOP. I just spent a few hours debugging an issue - OpenPOP's POPClient.GetMessage() was mysteriously returning null. I debugged this and found it was a string index bug - see the patch I submitted here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2833334&group_id=92166&atid=599778. It was difficult to find the cause since there are empty catch{} blocks that swallow exceptions.
Also, the project is mostly dormant... the last release was in 2004.
For now we're still using OpenPOP, but I'll take a look at some of the other projects people have recommended here.
HigLabo.Mail is easy to use. Here is a sample usage:
using (Pop3Client cl = new Pop3Client())
{
cl.UserName = "MyUserName";
cl.Password = "MyPassword";
cl.ServerName = "MyServer";
cl.AuthenticateMode = Pop3AuthenticateMode.Pop;
cl.Ssl = false;
cl.Authenticate();
///Get first mail of my mailbox
Pop3Message mg = cl.GetMessage(1);
String MyText = mg.BodyText;
///If the message have one attachment
Pop3Content ct = mg.Contents[0];
///you can save it to local disk
ct.DecodeData("your file path");
}
you can get it from https://github.com/higty/higlabo or Nuget [HigLabo]
I just tried SMTPop and it worked.
I downloaded this.
Added smtpop.dll reference to my C# .NET project
Wrote the following code:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using SmtPop;
namespace SMT_POP3 {
class Program {
static void Main(string[] args) {
SmtPop.POP3Client pop = new SmtPop.POP3Client();
pop.Open("<hostURL>", 110, "<username>", "<password>");
// Get message list from POP server
SmtPop.POPMessageId[] messages = pop.GetMailList();
if (messages != null) {
// Walk attachment list
foreach(SmtPop.POPMessageId id in messages) {
SmtPop.POPReader reader= pop.GetMailReader(id);
SmtPop.MimeMessage msg = new SmtPop.MimeMessage();
// Read message
msg.Read(reader);
if (msg.AddressFrom != null) {
String from= msg.AddressFrom[0].Name;
Console.WriteLine("from: " + from);
}
if (msg.Subject != null) {
String subject = msg.Subject;
Console.WriteLine("subject: "+ subject);
}
if (msg.Body != null) {
String body = msg.Body;
Console.WriteLine("body: " + body);
}
if (msg.Attachments != null && false) {
// Do something with first attachment
SmtPop.MimeAttachment attach = msg.Attachments[0];
if (attach.Filename == "data") {
// Read data from attachment
Byte[] b = Convert.FromBase64String(attach.Body);
System.IO.MemoryStream mem = new System.IO.MemoryStream(b, false);
//BinaryFormatter f = new BinaryFormatter();
// DataClass data= (DataClass)f.Deserialize(mem);
mem.Close();
}
// Delete message
// pop.Dele(id.Id);
}
}
}
pop.Quit();
}
}
}