Outlook Express and COM

[Tim Peters]

[Richard Waters]
> Slightly off the original topic; one thing to watch with Outlook
> (2000, maybe later versions also). There are 2 ways to install it. I
> don't remember the exact terminology,

IMO for Internet-Mail-Only, Corporate/Workgroup for Exchange-server enabled
installations.

> but one way gives you an internet-only version (very similar to OE), the
> other gives you the full, corporate Outlook package. The former has
> fewer automation interfaces available than the latter so be careful when
> you write code to automate it; may not work for everyone!

We bumped into this on the spambayes project.  IMO doesn't support CDO
(Collaboration Data Objects) out of the box, but an IMO user can easily
install CDO from their Office CD.  Mark Hammond found faster & better (but
seemingly more obscure) ways to replace CDO calls via extended MAPI calls
instead, and then spambayes worked for everyone.  There are still some
challenges in actually working with Exchange server installations, largely
because no spambayes developer has access to one.  It's not a lack of docs,
it's a lack of comprehensible docs <0.9 wink>.