Extracting data from an email message (or several thousand emails) [Exchange based] - exchange-server

Question

My marketing department, bless them, has decided to make a sweepstakes where people enter over a webpage. That is great but the information isn't stored to a DB of any sort but is sent to an exchange mail box as an email. Great.
My challenge is to extract the entry (and marketing info) from these emails and store them someplace more useful, say a flat file or CSV. The only saving grace is that the emails have a highly consistant format.
I am sure I could spend the time saving all the emails to files and then write an app to munge through them all but was hoping for a much more elegant solution. Can I programmatically access an exchange mailbox, read all the emails and then save that data?

Answer 1

Here is the code I used....
Private Sub btnGo_Click()
If ComboBox1.SelText <> "" Then
Dim objOutlook As New Outlook.Application
Dim objNameSpace As Outlook.NameSpace
Dim objInbox As MAPIFolder
Dim objMail As mailItem
//Get the MAPI reference
Set objNameSpace = objOutlook.GetNamespace("MAPI")
//Pick up the Inbox
Set objInbox = objNameSpace.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox)
For Each objFolder In objInbox.Folders
If (objFolder.Name = ComboBox1.SelText) Then
Set objInbox = objFolder
End If
Next objFolder
//Loop through the items in the Inbox
Dim count As Integer
count = 1
For Each objMail In objInbox.Items
lblStatus.Caption = "Count: " + CStr(count)
If (CheckBox1.Value = False Or objMail.UnRead = True) Then
ProcessMailItem (objMail.Body)
count = count + 1
objMail.UnRead = False
End If
Next objMail
End If
End Sub
Private Sub ProcessMailItem(strBody As String)
Open "C:\file.txt" For Append As 1
Dim strTmp As String
strTmp = Replace(strBody, vbNewLine, " ")
strTmp = Replace(strTmp, vbCrLf, " ")
strTmp = Replace(strTmp, Chr(13) & Chr(10), " ")
strTmp = Replace(strTmp, ",", "_")
//Extra Processing went here (Deleted for brevity)
Print #1, strTmp
Close #1
End Sub
Private Function Strip(strStart As String, strEnd As String, strBody As String) As String
Dim iStart As Integer
Dim iEnd As Integer
iStart = InStr(strBody, strStart) + Len(strStart)
If (strEnd = "xxx") Then
iEnd = Len(strBody)
Else
iEnd = InStr(strBody, strEnd) - 1
End If
Strip = LTrim(RTrim(Mid(strBody, iStart, iEnd - iStart)))
End Function
Private Sub UserForm_Initialize()
Dim objOutlook As New Outlook.Application
Dim objNameSpace As Outlook.NameSpace
Dim objInbox As MAPIFolder
Dim objFolder As MAPIFolder
//Get the MAPI reference
Set objNameSpace = objOutlook.GetNamespace("MAPI")
//Pick up the Inbox
Set objInbox = objNameSpace.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox)
//Loop through the folders under the Inbox
For Each objFolder In objInbox.Folders
ComboBox1.AddItem objFolder.Name
Next objFolder
End Sub

Answer 2

There's lots of different ways to get at the messages in an exchange mailbox, but since it seems this is something you're only going to want to run once to extract the data I'd suggest writing a VBA macro to run inside Outlook itself (having opened the exchange mailbox in question within Outlook). It's pretty easy to iterate through the mail items in a specific mailbox and read the body text from them. You can then write a text file with just the stuff you want.