Here's a simple solution. It works for me, but you might have environmental factors (i.e. security) which might necessitate some tweaking.

use Win32::OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Const ('Microsoft Outlook');

my $ol = new Win32::OLE 'Outlook.Application';
my $sess = $ol->GetNamespace('MAPI') or die ;

for my $folder ( $sess->GetDefaultFolder( olFolderInbox ) )
{
    print qq(\nUnRead items in folder "), $folder->FolderPath, qq(":\n
+\n);
    my $items = $folder->Items;

    local( $\, $, ) = ( "\n", "\t" );
    print $_->ReceivedTime->Date, $_->Subject
        for grep $_->UnRead, in $items;
}
[download]

It prints the received time and the subject line of each UnRead item. It does not attempt to sort the items; it prints them in the order returned by the MAPI interface.

NB: The UnRead method seems to have a bug. It returns false for some items which appear as unread in my Outlook inbox. I suspect that these items were read and subsequently manually changed back to "unread"; and that this method is somehow able to detect this. It may be looking at the definedness of a "read on date" attribute, rather than the user-visible/settable status.

I suppose I needed to be more specific. This is connecting from a Unix Box. I had hoped to be able to display to a user if they had unread mail while logged into the website which is running on apache on unix.

On Unix you can't use OLE::Win32 - as I wrote before, go for pop3/imap if the server supports it.

---

Perl 6 in German

Check if your server supports that, and if yes, use it. That should be easier, and there are more examples around.

BTW did you use the Super Search?

Update: Perl MAPI to access Exchange Server and the followups contain some interesting links.