I'm trying to write an asp.net (using c#) app that accesses my Outlook mailbox and display the messages. I searched on google but couldn't find useful info, any help is appreciated?
You must be aware of the fact that outlook is running on user local machine, and your ASP.NET application is running on some server and there is no way that your server side ASP.NET code can use Outlook local data.
AFAIK only way to do something like that would be creating outlook addin that will export all mails to ASP.NET application
If you are using Exchange then you can use Exchange Web Services to read emails.
Please see here
Be very careful that you do not attempt to access Outlook on the server side by using the Automation interfaces. All of the Microsoft Office desktop applications are written to be run by an interactive user in a process with a message pump, with all synchronization happening via the UI. When you run them in a multi-threaded environment like ASP.NET, horrible things will happen. If you're lucky, the application will simply crash.
If you're not lucky, you can suffer from data corruption, random crashes in unrelated code, and all the other things that happen when an application corrupts memory.
You may also violate your license if the people accessing the Office application through your web site are not individually licensed to use the application on their desktop.
You can't connect to Outlook via C# (ASP.NET), but you can connect to your mailserver via POP3/IMAP to read the mail.
IMAP Client library using C#
Related
I am converting an old Silverlight application into Asp.Net Core, using Blazor and Razor Pages.
The old application is opening Outlook, and creating an email ready to send with a Subject, From etc, plus a series of attachments. It is creating an object to do this using the following code:
Dynamic outlook = AutomationFactory.GetObject(“Outlook.Application”).
In my web-site, I do something similar:
Use a COM reference to the Microsoft Outlook 16.0 object library.
If Outlook is already running, then get a reference to its associated “Outlook.Application” COM object as per https://renenyffenegger.ch/notes/Microsoft/dot-net/namespaces-classes/System/Runtime/InteropServices/Marshal/GetActiveObject.
Otherwise, create an object using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application appOutlook = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application();
This works when running my web-site locally in Visual Studio, however I cannot deploy it to Azure:
C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\6.0.201\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets(2926,5): Error : MSB4803: The task "ResolveComReference" is not supported on the .NET Core version of MSBuild. Please use the .NET Framework version of MSBuild. See https://aka.ms/msbuild/MSB4803 for further details.
I’m assuming that I won’t be able to use this approach, however I can’t see any alternative. Any suggestions as to how I can do this in an ASP.Net Core Blazor web-site would be greatly appreciated.
You cannot use Outlook, or any other Office app, in a service (such as IIS). Even if you do manage to make it run, it won't help you - your code is running on the server, and the message you populate and display will be on the server, where nobody would ever see it.
You can either use a mailto: link (it supports address, subject, and body) or (if you need HTML and/or attachments), dynamically create an EML (MIME) file - Outlook on the client side will be happy to open it. To make sure the message is editable, add X-Unsent: 1 MIME header.
In my web-site, I do something similar:
Use a COM reference to the Microsoft Outlook 16.0 object library.
The Considerations for server-side Automation of Office states the following:
Microsoft does not currently recommend, and does not support, Automation of Microsoft Office applications from any unattended, non-interactive client application or component (including ASP, ASP.NET, DCOM, and NT Services), because Office may exhibit unstable behavior and/or deadlock when Office is run in this environment.
If you are building a solution that runs in a server-side context, you should try to use components that have been made safe for unattended execution. Or, you should try to find alternatives that allow at least part of the code to run client-side. If you use an Office application from a server-side solution, the application will lack many of the necessary capabilities to run successfully. Additionally, you will be taking risks with the stability of your overall solution.
From a JS code you can automate Outlook from Internet Explorer (only on Windows). Other browsers don't know anything about the COM technology. So, I'd suggest considering other approaches for getting the work done. The easiest way, like Dmitry suggested, is to use the mailto protocol. It opens a client's e-mail system and begins a new email message. The following example shows a link that will prepare an e-mail message:
<a href="mailto:user#example.com?
subject=MessageTitle&
body=Message Content">
Contact Us</a>
You may consider using EWS or Graph API if you need to send email silently.
I've received requirements to upgrade a legacy Outlook addin, which requires an active logged on user, to a standalone microservice (implemented using NServiceBus).
The goal of the addin is to monitor incoming emails (by communicating with the Exchange) that match certain pre-set criteria and do stuff with it.
Is VSTO sufficiently robust to run inside a Windows Service?
Is it sufficiently threadsafe?
Could it lock up the mailbox, making it unreachable via human interaction?
Could VSTO make the service crash?
Even worse, could VSTO cause the Exchange to lock / crash?
If any of these concerns are real, are there alternatives?
I would say that it not advisable to run VSTO within a windows service. Writing something in VSTO is useful for its UI components, presenting something to the user, interacting with the user, and would mean you would need to start an instance of Outlook for your add-in to load. Installing Office on the server is typically frowned upon, create problems when used in a multi-threaded way, and create problems most developers are unprepared to handle.
There are also other avenues you might want to explore, so instead of using the Outlook library directly you can use Exchange Web Services (EWS) via the EWS Managed API, or if you are not on-prem, go with the REST or Graph API.
I'm updating a very old VB.NET console application to C#. The old application used the Domino libraries to send and search through received email through a Lotus Notes client.
My organization has since migrated all email to Office 365 and the Lotus Notes server will be retired soon. I need to be able to send emails through the Outlook REST API, and use the API to search for any email received since the last time the app ran with a specific key word in the subject (no need to actually read the email, just the subject.)
I've set up the app in https://dev.outlook.com/AppRegistration, checked all the Mail API boxes and copied the Client ID. But now I'm unsure how to proceed, since every tutorial I see involves an interactive session where the user grants access to the application. My application needs to be able to run unattended. No live interaction will be possible.
To further complicate the issue, I'm developing this app using Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Express on a Windows XP virtual machine. I could probably get our IS department to upgrade the virtual machine, but most likely Windows 7/Visual Studio 2013 will be as up-to-date as I can get.
Can anyone point me to a tutorial for authenticating with the Outlook REST API in a C# .NET console application without requiring user interaction?
I have developed a Windows application in C# that sends bulk mail using Microsoft Office interop. Mails are sent properly but I want to disable the security warning from Microsoft Outlook that pops up before sending each mail. I want to disable it through code and not using any 3rd party application by changing in registry.
Got this resolved by going back to the code and changed the way it had been coded previously.
This link helped me in order to write the code which is trusted by Outlook.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/vsto/specific-security-considerations-for-office-solutions?redirectedfrom=MSDN&view=vs-2019
You get a standard security prompt in Outlook.
There are several ways for suppressing such prompts:
Use a third-party components for suppressing Outlook security warnings. See Security Manager for Microsoft Outlook for more information.
Use a low-level API instead of OOM. Or any other third-party wrappers around that API, for example, Redemption.
Develop a COM add-in which has access to the trusted Application object.
Use group policy objects for setting up machines.
You can read more about all these ways on the Outlook "Object Model Guard" Security Issues for Developers page.
I need to create a very simple c# Windows Service to listen for, and process email wth special subject lines. I already have the code that process these emails working well. For ease of development, I just packaged the code in an "Outlook Addin" on my own machine, running under my own email account. Works great.
Now that it's working, I need to move this to the server. I have a special email account setup on the Exchange Server for this purpose. I really don't want Outlook running on the server. Is there some other way to login to this email account and listen for email from my Windows Service without using the Outlook client?
Thanks!
It sounds like your code is closely tied to Outlook, so you may have to change your approach for the server. I faced exactly the same problem last year and considered the following options :
CDO (not supported by Microsoft with .NET due to some strangeness when running in process)
WebDAV for Exchange 2003
Web Services for Exchange 2007 (great example in the link)
You also need to ask yourself - do you actually need your program to check the mail server? I couldnt use any of the above options so ended up having one of the mail admins set up an exchange rule that dropped the emails/attachments into a special folder on the server. I could then process the files at my leisure. Worked extremely well and much easier to maintain than directly interrogating the mail server through code.
If your exchange admin has enabled it you can use IMAP or POP3 to connect to the server.
You can also use MAPI to connect as well.
You can find a number of libraries (free and otherwise) for doing all three.
I have had good experience with MailBee IMAP but there are definitely free alternatives if you only need to do some simple functionality.