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.

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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 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

Answer 4

Microsoft has documented this: .MSG File Format Specification

Answer 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...

Answer 6

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 7

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.