[python-win32] Manipulating MAPI

[Mike Driscoll]

Tim, 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tim Golden [mailto:mail at timgolden.me.uk] 
> Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 3:54 AM
> To: Mike Driscoll
> Cc: python-win32 at python.org
> Subject: Re: [python-win32] Manipulating MAPI
> 
> Mike Driscoll wrote:
> > Our organization has been slowly migrating away from closed source 
> > software. ... Now we use a web client instead of Outlook (in most 
> > cases) to check out email.
> > 
> > Unfortunately, we discovered that there a number of users 
> who like to 
> > be able to use MS Word to send email. So I wrote a Python 
> script using 
> > wxPython that can send email, including attachments. My problem is 
> > getting the email function in MS Word/Office to send its 
> information 
> > to my program. I've been able to get the mailto 
> functionality from web 
> > pages to work, but not this.
> 
> OK. Gleaned knowledge here with just a touch of experience.
> I think that any email client must actually support MAPI via 
> a DLL. I remembered this from looking into Eudora's support a 
> while ago which gave me a leg up in searching and led me to this page:
> 
> http://kb.mozillazine.org/MAPI_Support
> 
> It occurred to me that you could look at the Thunderbird 
> source if you were really serious, but I suspect it would be 
> no small amount of work to get it to work. I don't know where 
> your registry keys came from, but running RegMon while asking 
> Thunderbird or Outlook to set themselves as the default email 
> client is quite illustrative.
> 
> Could you not simply have Thunderbird installed for those 
> users who wanted a non-web email client? (Maybe that's what 
> you already do). It seems better than the old wheel reinvention :)
> 
> TJG
> 

We are looking at Thunderbird, but only a couple of people in the IS
department have it. We may go with it, but we have to make sure that
Thunderbird doesn't allow extremely non-standard things like Outlook did.
For instance, Outlook/Exchange allowed the user to open an Office document
from within Outlook, edit the document and save it back to its email
location somewhere in the nebulous Exchange server. Basically this opens
the door for litigation if someone sends a legal document here and one of
the users edits it, then there is no record of the original document being
received anymore.

Anyway, I agree that reinventing wheels is usually not a good
idea...except for practice or in the pursuit of learning.

Thank you for your input. I'll check out your link as well.

Mike