[python-win32] Manipulating MAPI (original) (raw)

Tim Golden mail at timgolden.me.uk
Tue Jan 29 10:54:07 CET 2008

Mike Driscoll wrote:

Our organization has been slowly migrating away from closed source software. ... Now we use a web client instead of Outlook (in most cases) to check out email.

Unfortunately, we discovered that there a number of users who like to be able to use MS Word to send email. So I wrote a Python script using wxPython that can send email, including attachments. My problem is getting the email function in MS Word/Office to send its information to my program. I've been able to get the mailto functionality from web pages to work, but not this.

OK. Gleaned knowledge here with just a touch of experience. I think that any email client must actually support MAPI via a DLL. I remembered this from looking into Eudora's support a while ago which gave me a leg up in searching and led me to this page:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/MAPI_Support

It occurred to me that you could look at the Thunderbird source if you were really serious, but I suspect it would be no small amount of work to get it to work. I don't know where your registry keys came from, but running RegMon while asking Thunderbird or Outlook to set themselves as the default email client is quite illustrative.

Could you not simply have Thunderbird installed for those users who wanted a non-web email client? (Maybe that's what you already do). It seems better than the old wheel reinvention :)

TJG

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