{"id":188,"date":"2007-09-13T20:44:41","date_gmt":"2007-09-13T20:44:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=188"},"modified":"2007-09-28T09:44:30","modified_gmt":"2007-09-28T09:44:30","slug":"process-your-emails-an-outlook-plugin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=188","title":{"rendered":"Process your emails – an Outlook plugin"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got a nice email last week from someone asking why I never made the “triage” Outlook plugin<\/a> I mentioned last year available as I have with other bits of code<\/a>. The short answer was obviously because I never got round to finishing it! \ud83d\ude42 <\/p>\n

However, the idea feels a bit more topical at the moment so I think it is worth revisiting. <\/p>\n

The aim was to create something that would let me process my emails in Outlook Mobile (the cut-down version of Outlook you get on Windows Mobile PDAs and smartphones). <\/p>\n

“Processing”<\/a>, rather than doing emails is an idea that I hear people mention more often since Merlin Mann’s brilliant Inbox Zero talk<\/a> started doing the rounds as a Google video. I’m even hearing other people use it as a phrase<\/a> from time to time! I used to call it “triaging” my email, but I think “processing” is actually a better term. Either way, the idea is that I want to be able to go through my inbox as quickly as possible – doing something with each one so that I can finish up with an empty inbox. <\/p>\n

\"Inbox<\/a>It doesn’t mean doing everything right away – just putting the information in it’s right place. If it’s an email asking me to do something, the right place for the email is in my Task List, not my Inbox. If it’s an email telling me about a meeting or appointment, then the right place for the email is in my Calendar. If it’s an email containing information that I need to keep for future reference, then the right place for it is in my wiki<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Mobile phones seem like an ideal tool for processing email, as it’s something that you can do when you have a few spare minutes and without having to do a lot of text entry or other input. Rather rely on manual (and slow!) copy-and-pasting, I wanted Outlook Mobile to be able to move my emails around like this for me. This was the idea of the plugin…<\/p>\n

If you are interested in the pain of writing MAPI plugins in C++, read on. If you are… erm… normal – then the short version is that I tidied up the code and made it available<\/a>. <\/p>\n

As I mentioned when I originally wrote the plugin, the idea was to use IContextMenu to add new menu items to Outlook’s context menu<\/a>. Once you’ve got that bit working, most of it is pretty straightforward. The only other tricky bit is writing the MAPI code to get the information you want out of the email. <\/p>\n

There is a nice intro to Getting Started with MAPI<\/a> on the Windows Mobile Team Blog (annoyingly written about five months after I spent a few nights trying to get my head around it with virtually no doc! \ud83d\ude42<\/em>), which tells you how to get simple short values out of emails using MAPI – like the date\/time an email was sent. <\/p>\n

Getting longer properties – like the body of the email – is more complicated, and isn’t something that was covered in the blog post. It was asked for a few times in the comments<\/a> so I’ve copied a simplified snippet of code below in case it is helpful to people.<\/p>\n

\/\/ starting with pMsg - an IMessage, as it's fairly straightforward \r\n\/\/   to get to that bit\r\n\r\n\/\/ need a different method to get larger properties, like the email body\r\nLPSTREAM        pStmBody    = NULL;\r\nSTATSTG         statstg     = {0};\r\nDWORD           cbRead      = 0;\r\n\r\n\/\/ open a stream that we will use to get the email body\r\npMsg->OpenProperty(PR_CE_MIME_TEXT, \r\n                   &IID_IStream, \r\n                   STGM_READ, \r\n                   NULL, \r\n                   (LPUNKNOWN*)&pStmBody);\r\n\r\n\/\/ we successfully opened the stream\r\n\/\/ before getting data out of it, we use stat to ask how\r\n\/\/  much space we will need\r\nmemset(&statstg, 0, sizeof(statstg));\r\npStmBody->Stat(&statstg, STATFLAG_NONAME);\r\n\r\nint msgsize = statstg.cbSize.LowPart + 1;\r\n\r\n\/\/ allocate space in the string's used to store the body\r\nchar* szEmailBody = (char*)malloc(sizeof(char) * msgsize);\r\n\r\n\/\/ read data from the stream into our char array\r\nhr = pStmBody->Read((void*)szEmailBody, msgsize, &cbRead);\r\n\r\n\/\/ finished with the stream\r\npStmBody->Release();<\/pre>\n
As I’ve mentioned before<\/a>, when you get the PR_CE_MIME_TEXT<\/code> contents of a mail from a POP3 account, you get the MIME version of the email. It’s still readable, you just get a bunch of headers at the top. It’s a pain, but not bad enough that I’ve ever been bothered to write the code to clean that bit off the top. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
With the Outlook account, the MIME headers aren’t included when the emails are transferred from your computer by ActiveSync, so when you get the PR_CE_MIME_TEXT<\/code> contents, it’s just the body. <\/p>\n
With the SMS Text Messages account, the whole message is in the PR_SUBJECT<\/code> property, so you don’t have to bother with the whole streams bit at all!<\/p>\n
And there we go… few nice extra options to help get through your email a bit quicker. The code probably needs a bit more work and there might be a small memory leak or two hiding in there, but it seems to more-or-less do the trick for now. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I got a nice email last week from someone asking why I never made the “triage” Outlook plugin I mentioned last year available as I have with other bits of code. The short answer was obviously because I never got round to finishing it! \ud83d\ude42 However, the idea feels a bit more topical at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-code"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}