HOWTO: Save Attachments to File with MSMAPI.VBX or MSMAPI.OCX

• Microsoft Visual Basic Control Creation, Learning, Professional, and Enterprise Editions for Windows, version 5.0
• Microsoft Visual Basic Standard, Professional, and Enterprise Editions, 16-bit and 32-bit, for Windows, version 4.0

SUMMARY

The MAPIMessage Control has procedures to attach and remove attachments from a message, but nothing apparent to allow writing the attachment back out to a permanent file. This article contains a code sample demonstrating how this can be done.

MORE INFORMATION

When a message that contains an attachment is opened, any attachments are written to the system's temp directory. The path and filename to this temporary file are stored in the AttachmentPathName property of the message.

You can copy the file as desired using the Visual Basic FileCopy file function.

NOTE: The filename is in 8.3 format, so long filenames will be lost.

The following code sample demonstrates how to access the path and filename to the temporary file and copy the temporary file to the Root of drive C:

   Sub Form_Load ()
       mapisession1.Action = 1 'session_signon
       mapimessages1.SessionID = mapisession1.SessionID
       mapimessages1.FetchUnreadOnly = True
       mapimessages1.Action = 1 'message_fetch
       Dim i As Integer
       For i = 0 To mapimessages1.AttachmentCount - 1
           mapimessages1.AttachmentIndex = i
           Dim intLenFileName As Integer
           Dim intStrPos As Integer
           intLenFileName = Len(mapimessages1.AttachmentPathName)
           For intStrPos = intLenFileName To 1 Step -1
               If InStr(1, _
                        Right$(mapimessages1.AttachmentPathName, _
                               intLenFileName - (intStrPos - 1)), _
                        "\", 1) Then
                   strNewFileName = _
                      Right$(mapimessages1.AttachmentPathName, _
                             intLenFileName - intStrPos)
                   Exit For
               End If
           Next
           FileCopy mapimessages1.AttachmentPathName, _
                    "c:\" & strNewFileName
       Next
   End Sub