Microsoft Outlook's security problems have been fodder for everything from third-party add-ons to running jokes by systems administrators.
The most recent versions of Microsoft Outlook are far more secure than older editions of the program. This is great from an end-user perspective, but some new security features inhibit functionality that would be quite useful to administrators and developers.
Programmer Dmitry Streblechenko has come up with an intriguing workaround to this issue -- a programming library he calls Outlook Redemption 4.1.
Outlook Redemption lets you get around Microsoft Outlook's security limitations and provides an additional level of code functionality for programmers. The libraries can be used by any programming language that have access to COM objects, so Visual Basic and VBScript can both make use of them.
Some of the features of Outlook Redemption:
- Code you create for Microsoft Outlook can run without the limitations of the Outlook Security Patch.
- You can access properties of messages that are not exposed through the conventional Outlook Object Mode, such as Internet message headers or senders' email addresses.
- You can directly access the Rich Text Format (RTF) body of any Microsoft Outlook item (not just email messages).
- Data can be imported and exported in a great many formats: .MSG, .EML (RFC822), .TNEF, .TXT, .HTML, and vCard are all supported.
- MAPI profiles, accounts and stores can be programmatically accessed and manipulated.
- Message attachments can be accessed as data objects (arrays or strings) without needing to be extracted and saved as data files.
The Outlook Redemption libraries also include Redemption Data Objects (RDO), a library used to replace Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) and expand on their functionality. For instance, RDO lets you access Exchange Server personal stores (.PST files), where CDO does not.
About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is editor of the Windows Power Users Newsletter.
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