How do I access Outlook mails with ASP.NET?

Question

I'm trying to write an asp.net (using c#) app that accesses my Outlook mailbox and display the messages. I searched on google but couldn't find useful info, any help is appreciated?

Answer 1

You must be aware of the fact that outlook is running on user local machine, and your ASP.NET application is running on some server and there is no way that your server side ASP.NET code can use Outlook local data.

AFAIK only way to do something like that would be creating outlook addin that will export all mails to ASP.NET application

Answer 2

If you are using Exchange then you can use Exchange Web Services to read emails.

Please see here

Answer 3

Be very careful that you do not attempt to access Outlook on the server side by using the Automation interfaces. All of the Microsoft Office desktop applications are written to be run by an interactive user in a process with a message pump, with all synchronization happening via the UI. When you run them in a multi-threaded environment like ASP.NET, horrible things will happen. If you're lucky, the application will simply crash.

If you're not lucky, you can suffer from data corruption, random crashes in unrelated code, and all the other things that happen when an application corrupts memory.

You may also violate your license if the people accessing the Office application through your web site are not individually licensed to use the application on their desktop.

Answer 4

You can't connect to Outlook via C# (ASP.NET), but you can connect to your mailserver via POP3/IMAP to read the mail.

IMAP Client library using C#