[python-win32] Obtaining Outlook item properties from saved email file

[Paul Moore]

2009/2/16 Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com>:
> 2009/2/16 Tim Golden <mail at timgolden.me.uk>:
>> They're structured storage and a bit opaque. In principle
>> this (very sketchy and untested) code should get you started:
>
> Thanks, that's a good start. Actually, your mention of the IStream
> interface below reminds me, I'm fairly sure I saw somewhere a mention
> of a CDO method to load a message from a stream, so that's probably
> what I need (plus your code below).
>
> I'll go rummaging and see what I can find. Thanks!

For reference, what I came up with is

import sys
from win32com.client import Dispatch

filename = sys.argv[1]

stm = Dispatch("ADODB.Stream")
stm.Open()
stm.LoadFromFile(filename)
msg = Dispatch("CDO.Message")
msg.DataSource.OpenObject(stm, "_Stream")

print repr(msg.From)
print repr(msg.Subject)
#print repr(msg.TextBody)

which is essentially what gets recommended in various places on the
web. Ironically, it's not using structured storage, but ADO streams,
for whatever the difference implies.

One minor problem - it doesn't work for me (:-)) I suspect this might
be to do with subtle issues around the version of Outlook we use
(2003) and whether I save the file as "Outlook Message Format" or
"Outlook Message Format - Unicode". I say this, because these issues
gave us compatibility problems a while ago, which we never tracked
down but which "went away" somewhere in a series of patches/updates.
So it may be I'm hitting an old CDO library, or something.

Sigh. It's stuff like this that makes me end up doing stuff by hand
whenever I try scripting Outlook :-(

I'll report back on what (if anything) I find - if only for the archives.
Paul.