Outlook: Recovering e-mail messages from attachments

Recently, I was what I thought to be dragging e-mail from my Inbox into my Personal Folders. Outlook warned me that the process could take some time due to the amount of messages selected, but I went ahead with the move. After a while, Outlook popped up a freshly created e-mail message containing my 1000+ e-mail messages!

The new e-mail was about 85MB and the original message were gone from my inbox... I really wanted those e-mails in my Personal Folders. However, Outlook programming is something I've always shied away from. After some experimenting, I discovered what I wanted couldn't be easily done using Outlook APIs...

I wanted to:

1. Open the e-mail message containing the attached 1000+ 'backups'
2. Iterate the attachments
3. Save the attachments as e-mails into my Personal Folders box

After a lot of headache, I discovered Redemption (see http://www.dimastr.com/redemption/). Redemption provides interop between .NET and the Extended MAPI. Using redemption, I finally succeeded in achieving my goal. Just in case someone else outthere is as silly as I am, here's how I did it:

// To use this namespace you must set a
// reference to the Microsoft Outlook 11.0
// COM server. 
using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook;
using OutLookApp = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application;
using System.IO;
using rd = Redemption;

ApplicationClass outLookApp = new ApplicationClass();
NameSpace outlookNS = outlookApp.GetNamespace("MAPI");

MailItem attachmentsItem = (MailItem)outlookNS.GetItemFromID(messageId, null);

// left out for clarity: find the Personal Folders->Inbox folder

rd.MAPIUtils utils = new rd.MAPIUtils();
utils.MAPIOBJECT = outlookNS.MAPIOBJECT;

foreach (Attachment a in attachmentsItem.Attachments)
{
 string attachmentFile = Path.GetTempFileName();
 a.SaveAsFile(attachmentFile);

 MailItem underlyingItem = 
  (MailItem)personalFolder.Items.Add(OlItemType.olMailItem);

 rd.MessageItem neww = 
  utils.GetItemFromMsgFile(attachmentFile, false);

 underlyingItem.Save();
 
 MailItem placedItem = 
  (MailItem)underlyingItem.Move(personalFolder);

 neww.CopyTo(placedItem);
}

This code misses all kinds of nice sanity checks, like whether the attachment actually is a MSG file, etc. It sufficed for my scenario and I now have the e-mails back. FYI :-D

WPF - themes in SDK

I'm probably the last one to notice, but just in case I'm not... The themes included in PresentationFramework are included in the SDK (zipped in WPFSamples.zip) under

WPFSamples\Core\AeroTheme
WPFSamples\Core\ClassicTheme
WPFSamples\Core\LunaTheme
WPFSamples\Core\RoyaleTheme

:-D Definitely inspirational stuff!