Ideas for storing e-mail messages in a Delphi clie

Question

There are many suggestions here and there for storing e-mail messages. Somehow what I am doing is writing an Outlook addin to send emails from inbox/sent folders directly to my application.

So only what is really interesting is saved. And I decide where to save it.

Imagine this case:

I recieve an email from a customer. It's up to me to decide whether I should save it on the customer or on the order 24 that that customer did. So this is why I am doing the add in, and not some automatic storing of emails = noise after some time.

This said, how to store the emails? For the emails that I recieve or send through Outlook the idea could be save the whole file in a blob field (so the eml file), may be I can save also other info (like the subject) in another text field. But the problem comes when I write an email from my application.

In this case I am not generating an eml file, I send through MAPI data to Outlook to compose an email that I will send with Outlook (so in this case I cannot save the eml), or I directly send it with Indy. Also in this case I don't have the eml file...

One idea could be that the all the emails that I auto compose have a special flag that the Add in recognises and therefore when I send the mail it is stored back to the DB. So in this case I can save the eml also of the mails I sent from my application.

May you comment?

Answer 1

First you have to decide on on what information you want to store. The rest is just a means to get there.

One option is to store the .msg files (you have posted related questions suggesting you are no stranger to MAPI) in stead of .eml files. Using MAPI you can store the IMessage you created as a .msg file (with a bit of pain). However, not all mapi props will be set until the message actually is sent, you so might need to hook outlooks send items folders for that.

A much more straightforward solution would be to generate the .eml (or whatever textbased format you prefer) directly from the source. When sending, take your source data, generate the correct MAPI calls to outlook AND generate the .eml and store it directly into your database. When recieving, have Outlook save to .eml directly.

Personally, I wouldn't use .eml at all for storage. I would parse the data I'm particularly interested in (like to/from addresses) into separate columns. In the end, you are probably using your DB for data retrieval. Databases tend to do a better job when you don't store everything in a single memo/blob field. :)