Read from .msg files [closed]

Answer 1

Microsoft has documented this: .MSG File Format Specification

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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...