Dunno how to title this better. This is a rather strange situation for which I first considered Perl, ran into a few roadblocks, a colleague started messing with VBA, ran into even more roadblocks, and I am now reconsidering Perl.

If the incoming email has a particular subject line (I can use email filter), certain information has to be extracted from the email message (I can use Perl if I can access the message contents), a record with some of the info from the message has to be inserted into a SQL-Server table (use DBI with DBD-ODBC), the message is to be possibly reformatted (of trivial difficulty), and forwarded to one or more pre-determined addresses. All this has to be accomplished unattended and with no human intervention.

The email server is Exchange, and the most likely email client is Outlook.

Initially I "assumed" we were going to use Outlook, tried to run a Perl script from within Outlook, but was not able to... we tried doing it all in VBA using ADO, but ran into a similar problem. Seems like after being burned by too many viruses accessing Outlook innards, MS has made even legitimate access to Outlook very difficult.

I am seeking any advice from fellow monks on a possible approach to solving this problem. If the technique is successful, I think I can even justify ditching Outlook completely and use some other email client. But I am not sure if I can use Perl to directly access an email received by Exchange server.

I found a few discouraging Google hits on MAPI and Perl, and a number of hits on accessing Excel spreadsheets and whatnot. Nothing of the sort I am describing above.

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

In reply to Controlling Email on Windows with Perl by punkish

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