RE: MAPI backend (was: Offtopic: Forwarding in MS Outlook)

RE: MAPI backend (was: Offtopic: Forwarding in MS Outlook)

[Horsley Tom]

As a way to thwart the forces of evil who mandate MS mail, I've
been working on a program that will run on your PC and access
your outlook mailbox, then act as a POP3 server, thus allowing you
to use any mail reader you want even when Outlook is mandated.

Don't bother to ask when I'll be done, because I have no idea,
but it is a fun project :-).

Re: MAPI backend (was: Offtopic: Forwarding in MS Outlook)

[Karel Sprenger]

Hi,

>>> On Wed, 3 May 2000 16:09:01 -0400 , Horsley Tom (Horsley) wrote:
Horsley> 
Horsley> As a way to thwart the forces of evil who mandate MS mail, I've
Horsley> been working on a program that will run on your PC and access
Horsley> your outlook mailbox, then act as a POP3 server, thus allowing you
Horsley> to use any mail reader you want even when Outlook is mandated.
Horsley> 
Horsley> Don't bother to ask when I'll be done, because I have no idea,
Horsley> but it is a fun project :-).
Horsley> 

Will it also do the sending part?  Fetching is silver, but sending is...
I sure hope you come up with something that frees me from Outlook :-)

Cheers,
Karel (exposed to Exchange for six months)

-- 
Karel Sprenger <karel.sprenger@compaq.com>  | phone : +31-30-283 4842
Professional Services                       | mobile: +31-6-5178 5034
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*** PGP Public Key available on servers *** | email : cjas@xs4all.nl 

Offtopic: Forwarding in MS Outlook

[Roman Belenov]

Sorry for such offtopic, but 1) the reason of my question is quite
related to NT Emacs/Gnus 2) I don't know where to find info on MS
Outlook.

Is there any way to customize forwarding in MS Outlook so that it
forwards all headers of the original message ?

Actually I'm trying to make Gnus/Emacs work with MS Exchange server
(if anybody knows better solution, please inform me - but read below
for some details). Because of some changes in a company I'm working
for in a few weeks I won't be able to use POP3 server I'm using now
and POP3 will NOT be installed on MS Exchange server too (it's a
company policy, not an administrator decision).

The solution I'm trying to implement now is to make MS Outlook a
gateway between Gnus/Emacs and Exchange. Since MS Exchange
provides SMTP service (it seems that it won't be turned off), the
problem is with fetching incoming mail. So I wrote simple MTA that
simply saves incoming messages in the certain directory (it's enough
for Gnus) and made Outlook forward messages I'm interested in to that
MTA. The only problem is that MS Outlook strips almost all headers from the
message, so it's impossible to sort them and so on. Is there any way
to make Outlook forward messages verbatim ? Although even this
crippled solution may work (well, it's possible to sort messages
inside Outlook sending them to different addresses and then make
necessary fields in MTA based on recipient address) I hope it can be
enhanced.

-- 
 							With regards, Roman.

Re: Offtopic: Forwarding in MS Outlook

[Andrew Innes]

On 28 Apr 2000 11:58:35 +0400, Roman Belenov <roman@nstl.nnov.ru> said:
>Sorry for such offtopic, but 1) the reason of my question is quite
>related to NT Emacs/Gnus 2) I don't know where to find info on MS
>Outlook.
>
>Is there any way to customize forwarding in MS Outlook so that it
>forwards all headers of the original message ?
>
>Actually I'm trying to make Gnus/Emacs work with MS Exchange server
>(if anybody knows better solution, please inform me - but read below
>for some details). Because of some changes in a company I'm working
>for in a few weeks I won't be able to use POP3 server I'm using now
>and POP3 will NOT be installed on MS Exchange server too (it's a
>company policy, not an administrator decision).
>
>The solution I'm trying to implement now is to make MS Outlook a
>gateway between Gnus/Emacs and Exchange. Since MS Exchange
>provides SMTP service (it seems that it won't be turned off), the
>problem is with fetching incoming mail. So I wrote simple MTA that
>simply saves incoming messages in the certain directory (it's enough
>for Gnus) and made Outlook forward messages I'm interested in to that
>MTA. The only problem is that MS Outlook strips almost all headers from the
>message, so it's impossible to sort them and so on. Is there any way
>to make Outlook forward messages verbatim ? Although even this
>crippled solution may work (well, it's possible to sort messages
>inside Outlook sending them to different addresses and then make
>necessary fields in MTA based on recipient address) I hope it can be
>enhanced.

Hi Roman,

A better solution would be to write a variant of movemail.exe that uses
MAPI to get mail directly from the Exchange server.  When I first
started at my current job last summer, I thought I would have to do
this, but then found out the POP3 service was actually installed and it
was a DNS problem stopping me from seeing it.  So I never got as far as
writing this program, although a month before that there was some
discussion about it.  The mail is archived here:

  http://www.egroups.com/messagesearch/ntemacs-users?query=mapi

But if you are willing to work on it (necessity and all that), then I
can offer some help.  Even though I have POP access to Exchange, I would
actually prefer to have direct MAPI access, because the POP service
seems to take it upon itself to reformat messages, wrapping long lines
and omitting some "inline" attachments, and generally doing things that
irritate me.

We could also provide the sending part of the MAPI solution, and make
the whole thing part of Emacs proper, if you are willing to assign
copyright to the FSF (and get a disclaimer from your employer if
relevant).

AndrewI

MAPI backend (was: Offtopic: Forwarding in MS Outlook)

[Roman Belenov]

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If anybody is interested in writing MAPI-based mail fetcher, here is a
program I made for personal usage from PMSEU utility
(http://www.genusa.com/utils/pmseu.htm). It is written in Visual Basic
(it was first time I've done something with this dialect - never used
Basic since my schooldays :-). All parameters are hardwired; some
command line/config file parsing should make this utility quite usable.

The original program seems to be in public domain (although I'm not a
lawyer); I don't claim any rights on my code too. Anyway IMHO it
should be rewritten in C++ (should not be too hard since COM
interfaces are almost the same) and given proper interface (like
GNUish command-line parsing), so it can be made decent part of Emacs;
I don't sure I'll do it myself (the "get a disclaimer from your
employer if relevant" part seems to be the hardest - there were no
precedents in the company I'm working for and it seems that procedure
will be quite complicated).


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Andrew Innes <andrewi@gnu.org> writes:

> A better solution would be to write a variant of movemail.exe that uses
> MAPI to get mail directly from the Exchange server.  When I first
> started at my current job last summer, I thought I would have to do
> this, but then found out the POP3 service was actually installed and it
> was a DNS problem stopping me from seeing it.  So I never got as far as
> writing this program, although a month before that there was some
> discussion about it.  The mail is archived here:
> 
>   http://www.egroups.com/messagesearch/ntemacs-users?query=mapi
> 
> But if you are willing to work on it (necessity and all that), then I
> can offer some help.  Even though I have POP access to Exchange, I would
> actually prefer to have direct MAPI access, because the POP service
> seems to take it upon itself to reformat messages, wrapping long lines
> and omitting some "inline" attachments, and generally doing things that
> irritate me.
> 
> We could also provide the sending part of the MAPI solution, and make
> the whole thing part of Emacs proper, if you are willing to assign
> copyright to the FSF (and get a disclaimer from your employer if
> relevant).
> 
> AndrewI
> 
> 

-- 
 							With regards, Roman.