MAPI and managed code experiences? [closed]

Answer 1

Calling process.Start on the Mailto: protocol (as shown below) will give you basic functionality but not attachments.

Process.Start("mailto:name@domain.com?subject=TestCode&Body=Test Text");

You can do this approach with attachment paths but this option only works with some old version of outlook such as 98. I assume this is due to the potential securty risk.

If anyone does use outlook.exe it will give security warnings under outlook 2003 (and 2007 Dependant on settings).

Answer 2

I have done this using the MAPISendMail function and several internal classes to wrap some of the other MAPI related structures. As long as this is the only use, it is possible although not trivial to do safely as it requires a very close attention to the various unmanaged data types and memory allocation/deallocation and GC. While it still isn't supported, I am using this in production code (although it hasn't shipped yet).

When I asked Matt Stehle about this, the response I received was:

I really don't know of a much better way to do this and any issues you ran into here would be probably reproducible in a supported scenario (i.e. VB6 or unmanaged C++). Just know that if you ever ran into a scenario were an issue was caused specifically by this function being called from .NET that we wouldn't have any other recommendation for you then to not use .NET.

Not exactly a blessing on using it, but also not saying there are any other options to actually do this from managed code.