CDO & MAPI Programming with Visual Basic:

Working with Address Books

In MAPI, recipient information is stored in address books. A MAPI address book, much like a physical address book in which you keep your friends’ names and addresses, is a place to save information about potential message recipients. Address books are implemented by address book providers, which are software components that plug into MAPI in order to provide this feature. MAPI-compliant email systems typically come with one or more address book providers. To see the list of address book providers on your system, run the Mail applet from the Windows Control Panel, then click the Add button on the dialog box that appears. This brings up the “Add Service to Profile” dialog box, as shown in Figure 7-3. (If you don’t see this dialog box on your computer, your email system is not using MAPI. See “Obtaining MAPI” in Chapter 2, for more information.) The “Add Service to Profile” dialog box shows the information services that can be added to a profile. An information service is an address book provider, a message store provider, a transport provider, or some combination of all three. Figure 7-3 shows two address book providers: the Outlook Address Book, and the Personal Address Book. The Outlook Address Book provider is on this list because I happen to have Microsoft Outlook installed on my system. The Personal Address Book provider is supplied by MAPI itself. Although these appear to be the only address book providers available on this system, there are actually ...