Access and Manage Outlook MAPI Properties

MAPI properties are metadata items used in Microsoft Outlook messages, defining attributes such as sender, recipient, subject, attachments, and custom data.

Aspose.Email for C++ allows developers to access, modify, and remove these properties programmatically in MapiMessage objects, attachments, and named properties.

The MapiProperty class represents a MAPI property, which contains:

• Name – The property’s string identifier.
• Tag – A numeric identifier used to reference the property.
• Data – A byte array representing the property’s value.

Read MAPI Properties

Aspose.Email allows you to read MAPI properties using property tags.

The following code sample demonstrates how to read and display the subject property from a MAPI message file (.msg).

1. Get the directory path where the Outlook message files are stored.
2. Load the Outlook message file (“message.msg”) into a MapiMessage object.
3. Access the collection of MAPI properties from the message.
4. Try to retrieve the subject property using PR_SUBJECT (ANSI) tag.
5. If the ANSI subject property is not found, try to retrieve the Unicode subject property using PR_SUBJECT_W.
6. If the subject property exists, output its string value to the console.

Set MAPI Properties

MAPI properties can be set for messages or recipients to define custom attributes, email type, or synchronization status.

The following code sample demonstrates how to create a MAPI message, set multiple custom MAPI properties including sender and recipient details, message flags, and modification time, then save the message to a file.

Note: The ConvertDateTime() helper converts System::DateTime to a MAPI-compatible filetime byte array for date/time properties in the following way:

int64_t filetime = t.ToFileTime();

System::ArrayPtr<uint8_t> d = System::MakeArray<uint8_t>(8, 0);

d[0] = (uint8_t)(filetime & 0xFF);

d[1] = (uint8_t)((filetime & 0xFF00) >> 8);

d[2] = (uint8_t)((filetime & 0xFF0000) >> 16);

d[3] = (uint8_t)((filetime & 0xFF000000) >> 24);

d[4] = (uint8_t)((filetime & 0xFF00000000) >> 32);

d[5] = (uint8_t)((filetime & 0xFF0000000000) >> 40);

d[6] = (uint8_t)((filetime & 0xFF000000000000) >> 48);

d[7] = (uint8_t)(((uint64_t)filetime & 0xFF00000000000000) >> 56);

Read Named MAPI Properties

Named MAPI properties are custom properties added by users or applications.

Aspose.Email allows reading these properties from messages and attachments.

Reading Named MAPI Properties from MSG Files

The following code sample demonstrates how to load a MAPI message file, retrieve all its named MAPI properties, and iterate through them to find and display the values of specific named properties (“TEST” and “MYPROP”). It shows how to access custom or extended properties in a MAPI message by enumerating the property collection and conditionally processing properties based on their name identifiers.

Accessing Named MAPI Properties in Attachments

Named MAPI properties in attachments can be retrieved similarly:

Removing MAPI Properties

You can remove both standard and named MAPI properties from messages or attachments as shown in the code sample below: