The benefits of using MAPI are the ability to take applications where applications have never gone before. Users may obtain data from anywhere, using whatever e-mail system is available. The remote application will perform better, and there may be some improvement with the host database.
The challenge in implementing MAPI is the ability to resolve the issues and design for the environment. A successful design will be highly structured and may have several layers to simplify the design.
The design presented here was written in Visual Basic. The same design may be implemented with other products using DLLs and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).