[Chicago-talk] Re: Extracting info from Outlook's *.pst files

[Ed Summers]

I caught this off the module-authors list. It looks like barbie is going
to be releasing a module to get at Outlook files if you are still
interested, and are running Perl under Windows. The module isn't on
CPAN yet, but there is a link below for grabbing the tarball.

//Ed

----- Forwarded message from Barbie <barbie at missbarbell.co.uk> -----

To: module-authors at perl.org
From: Barbie <barbie at missbarbell.co.uk>
Subject: Mail::Outlook module
Date: 21 Jan 2004 14:00:40 +0000

Dear Module Authors,

Since my initial attempts to send mail via Outlook attached to an Exchange server, I now have a set of modules that can also read email items within Outlook Mail Folders. Initially this was a module for me to learn how to use the Win32 API via Perl, but wondered whether it might be useful to anyone else.

My current name for the distribution is

Mail-Outlook

which includes the following modules:

Mail::Outlook
Mail::Outlook::Folder
Mail::Outlook::Message

Each uses an OO style interface, with the Mail::Outlook module being the master module that should be used to interface to the outside world.

I have two questions ....

1) Is this a distribution worth uploading to CPAN?
2) Is Mail::Outlook a suitable namespace or are there better suggestions?

The current version is available online [1] if anyone wanted to have a look at it.

[1] http://birmingham.pm.org/modules/Mail-Outlook-0.05.tar.gz

>From studying the MailBox distribution, there are distributions on CPAN, which read the Outlook Express folders and email messages (although badly named IMO as they only refer to the DBX extension, but that's another story), but nothing that refers to Outlook specifically.

All thoughts and suggestions gratefully accepted.

Additional:

DESCRIPTION

This module was written to overcome the problem of sending mail messages, 
where Microsoft (R) Outlook (R) is the only mail application available.
However, since it's inception the module has expanded to handle a range of 
Outlook mail functionality.

Note that when sending messages, the module uses the named owner of the 
Outbox MAPI Folder in order to access the correct objects. Thus the From 
field of a new message is predetermined, and a read only property.

If using the 'Win32::OLE::Const' constants, only the following are currently 
supported:

  olFolderInbox
  olFolderOutbox
  olFolderSentMail

DEPENDENCIES

The distribution requires the following modules:

  Win32::OLE
  Win32::OLE::Const

For testing purposes, the following modules are desirable, but not essential:

  Test::Pod


Barbie.
-- 
Barbie (@missbarbell.co.uk) | Birmingham Perl Mongers | http://birmingham.pm.org/