Page 1 of 1

Retrieve email messages stored in my Outlook?

Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2007 11:37 am
by kevinmortimer
Hi All

I am very new to PHP and very much looking forward to learning it. I have a question and would like to find out if this is possible and if you could point me in the right direction.

I would like to retrieve email messages from a folder in my Outlook. The result being some form of structured document thst I can use eg CSV or comma seperated or tab seperated fil etc

Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2007 1:34 pm
by Chris Corbyn
I'm not sure how plausible it would be to get the emails from outlook itself. It's possible, that's for sure, but feasible, not so sure. Reading emails from the server however is definitely possible if you can connect with IMAP or POP. I'm not really sure of the interface provided by exchange servers if that's what you use.

Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2007 2:23 pm
by alex.barylski
Connecting to your Outlook?

I would have to agree...you'd be better off reading emails from a remote server using IMAP instead of trying to connect to Outlook. You can of course utilize the Outlook COM API (Google for a while and you'll find the requires resources) to do things like query your calendars, check stored emails, etc.

If your PHP is hosted on a remote Linux server and your Outlook is your desktop, your in for a challenge. Perhaps possible, I don't think Outlook is implemented as a server per se, but it's possible some of it's interfaces support DCOM which may allow components to communicate over the wrise using RPC. Using PHP under Linux you will likely have a hard time working with COM interfaces as I am not sure (quick search revealed nothing) there is an open source port of the Windows model.

What about GREP

Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2007 3:50 am
by kevinmortimer
Ok thanks for that.

Looks like I might need to tackle this from another angle.......Is it possible to use GREP in PHP to interogate system files like outlook?

Re: What about GREP

Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2007 4:47 am
by Chris Corbyn
kevinmortimer wrote:Ok thanks for that.

Looks like I might need to tackle this from another angle.......Is it possible to use GREP in PHP to interogate system files like outlook?
You can use grep from the command line via exec(), or you can use the PCRE functions to do the equivalent manually (preg_..() functions).