Outlook interop difference between Email1address and IMAddress

Question

I'm currently using interop to get all local contacts out of outlook. When I first programmed the programm I used the following code:

                Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application outlookHandler = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application();
                Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Items outlookItemsCollection;
                MAPIFolder folderContacts = (MAPIFolder)outlookHandler.Session.GetDefaultFolder(OlDefaultFolders.olFolderContacts);
                outlookItemsCollection = folderContacts.Items;

                foreach (var outlookItem in outlookItemsCollection)
                {
                   ContactItem contactItem = outlookItem as ContactItem;
                   //...do something 
                }

To get all contacts. now I've had some troubles with the emailaddress where I usedEMail1Address. I got some strange notation back from there that had not much to do with the mail address I'm looking for: "/o=Companyname/ou=City/cn=Department/cn=x.xyz" with the last part being the first part of the mail address. But when I then instead used contactItem.IMAddress I got the mail address as I had originally expected for Email1Address.

So my question is: Why is there this differnce and should IMAddress be used instead of Email1Address or am I overlooking here something?

Answer 1

The two addresses are completely unrelated. What you have for Email1Address is a perfectly valid EX type address (as opposed to SMTP).

When a GAL entry is added as a contact, Email1AddressType will be "EX". The SMTP address will be stored in a named MAPI property with the DASL name of http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062004-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/8084001F . You can access it using ContactItem.PropertyAccessor.GetPorperty.

Take a look at that contact with OutlookSpy (select the contact and click IMessage button).