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• Other (closed) formats, and address-books (Score:1)

  by MeerCat (31)

  I had a quick look at the docs and this looks like a very interesting project.

  Speaking as someone trying to move away from Win2K+Outlook to something more open, a series of modules that could read (and later write, or use as transport) to Outlook 2000 under Windows would be a great help (I think you'd have to use OLE Automation calls as the PST file format isn't documented). This would be great for opening up a very common but surprisingly closed mail system (Outlook talking to Exchange is another similar
  • Re:Other (closed) formats, and address-books (Score:1)

    by markov (3225)

    I do have some Outlook processing code, but it is far from complete. It is (as usual for M$) hard to get the real details about the format. Besides, I never use windows myself and want to keep it that way. It makes the development of Mail::Box dependent on other Perl hackers which do use Windows, and those people are very rare. (volunteers?)

    Address-book handing is certainly not something Mail::Box should do, although the Mail::Address object (from MailTools) which it uses can be improved a lot. In my e
    • Re:Other (closed) formats, and address-books (Score:1)

      by MeerCat (31) on 2003.01.07 6:36 (#15831) Homepage Journal

      Thanks for the reply.
      
      I understand the reticence to get on to Windows, but I think it might prove worthwhile if you want a larger audience (try floating the idea on the ActiveState Perl-Win32 mailing lists and see the response you get). Does your existing code use the MAPI interface, or OLE Automation to Outlook, or trying to read the PST file directly ? A (non-perl) mate recommends the MAPI approach. I'm not in a position to volunteer directly, but I will try and find some time to look at this over the next couple of weeks, and see if I can offer any insights.
      
      Similarly while address-book handling may not be directly applicable, but the ability to (directly) do queries like "return a list of Mail::Address objects for all the (unique) senders of messages in this Mail::Box" and similarly "return a list of all Messages to/from this Address within this MailBox" are powerful primitives (IMHO). If you were to do this, then you could make the address book in Outlook appear as a MailBox with no messages but lots of addresses.
      
      Maybe I should shut up until I get some time to put my coding-fingers where my mouth-fingers are... ;^)
      
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