"COOLdotNEt" wrote:
Hi,
How can I retrive a list of contact in outlook express?
It's been a year or two ago since I needed to do any kind of automation with
OE, so this may be outdated information, but I can relate my experience to
you.
Basically, at that time anyway, there was no way to automate OE in any kind
of "Microsoft sanctioned" way. In other words, it had no automation
capabilities built in. Outlook did, but OE did not. So, in my case (we built
a P2P spam killer app [similar to how Hotmail works now] that needed a "This
is Spam" button on the toolbar), we had to use a different technique.
Basically, we hooked the toolbar by injecting a DLL into OE, and then passed
it windows messages that instructed it to add a new button (and set the
winproc address to a function inside of the injected DLL). It was basically
a hack, but it worked.
Conceivably, you might be able to do something along those lines (maybe
using keyboard hooking or something) to get hold of the contact list, but if
you don't control your install base, it's hard to keep something like that
running well with all the versions of OE out there. Also, all of that type
of thing has come under scrutiny in XP, so it may not even be possible to do
that now.
Anyone else have any ideas? Has someone figured out the format of the OE
contact list database or anything? That'd be what I'd be checking into if I
were you.
