Automating Outlook with Ruby: Saving Mail Messages To Files

I've talked in the past about managing mail messages in your Inbox, and about saving email attachments to your hard drive. A reader recently asked about saving a mail message as a file on your hard drive.

This can be done by calling the MailItem's SaveAs() method. This method takes two arguments. The first argument is a string indicating the full path and filename to which you want to save the message. The second argument is an integer that indicates the file type.

Let's look at a brief example that saves an Inbox message as an HTML file:

require 'win32ole'

olHTML = 5

outlook = WIN32OLE.connect("Outlook.Application")

mapi = outlook.GetNameSpace("MAPI")

inbox = mapi.GetDefaultFolder(6)

msg = inbox.Items(2)

msg.SaveAs('c:\temp\message.htm', olHTML)

Further details on the SaveAs() method can be found here.

A full list of valid file type values can be found here.

That's all for now. Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Post a comment or send me an email.

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