Microsoft’s Messaging API has been the core interface to data held on their mail systems since the early 90’s. For Exchange 2007, it’s deprecated in favor of their new web service protocol but it’s still the language that Outlook speaks, and is the most comprehensive interface even for Exchange.

The underlying technology holding the mail data has changed massively over the years, and so the API has grown to be massive, inconsistent and obscure. It can’t be used with .Net, it requires C++ or a similar old-school language, and its behavior varies significantly between different versions of Outlook and Exchange. There’s some documentation and examples available, but what you really need is the source to a complete, battle-tested application. Surprisingly, that’s where a grassroots effort from Microsoft’s Stephen Griffin comes in!

He’s the author of MAPI Editor, an administrator tool for Exchange that lets you view the complete contents and properties of your mail store. It also offers a wealth of other features, like the ability to export individual messages or entire folders as XML. Even better, he’s made it a personal mission to keep the source available. I know how tricky getting that sort of approval can be in a large company and I’m very glad he succeeded, it’s been an invaluable reference for my work. I just wish it was given more prominence in the official Microsoft documentation, I had been working with the API for some time before I heard about it. That might be a reflection of it’s history, since it started off as a learning project, and evolved from being used as ad-hoc example code, to being documented in an official technical note, to shipping as part of the Exchange tools.

Another resource Stephen led me to is the MAPI mailing list. The archives are very useful, packed full of answers to both frequently and infrequently asked questions. It’s not often that you see an active technical mailing list that’s been going since 1994 either.