Extract entity strings from an Outlook item using VSTO (Outlook client not O365 based Office Add-ins)

Question

With web based Office add-ins, outlook provides APIs to extract entity strings (Address, contacts, email address etc.) from an Outlook item subject, body fields.

Please refer below articles. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/add-ins/extract-entity-strings-from-an-item

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/add-ins/match-strings-in-an-item-as-well-known-entities

Is there any similar thing available for COM based outlook plugins (VSTO) ? If not in built with Outlook API then any Microsoft service which we can use to pass text and get such results can also help.

Thanks, Manoj

Simon Li Simon Li · Accepted Answer · 2018-08-24T03:07:30

Yes, you can retrieve outlook email item by using VSTO. Here is the test code below:

private void InternalStartup()
    {

        var inbox = this.Application.ActiveExplorer().Session.GetDefaultFolder (Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderInbox);
        var mailItem = inbox.Items[1] as Outlook.MailItem;
        var subject = mailItem.Subject;
        var body = mailItem.Body;

        MessageBox.Show(string.Format("Subject = {0}, Body = {1}", subject,body));
    }

You can have a look this MSDN document below for MailItem members https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.interop.outlook.mailitem_members.aspx

For your additional question, you can use EWS (Exchange Web Server) to retrieve your email item.

Extract entity strings from an Outlook item using VSTO (Outlook client not O365 based Office Add-ins)

1 Answers