CDO & MAPI Programming with Visual Basic:

Organization of This Book

The book contains 12 chapters and 6 appendixes:

Chapter 1 gives an overview of messaging concepts. The chapter provides definitions for MAPI and CDO, presents their pros and cons, and discusses the kinds of applications that can be written to use this technology.

Chapter 2 provides a thorough explanation of MAPI architecture and an introduction to the technologies based on MAPI. This chapter provides fundamental concepts that are used throughout the book.

Chapter 3 examines Simple MAPI, which offers a subset of MAPI functionality. Simple MAPI should be used only by programmers who are maintaining existing Simple MAPI code. Other developers can safely skip this chapter.

Chapter 4 examines the MAPI ActiveX controls that come with the Professional and Enterprise editions of Visual Basic. These controls don’t expose the full functionality of MAPI (in fact, they use Simple MAPI internally), but they are sufficient for sending and receiving email with or without attachments. The controls have a shallow learning curve compared to other technologies described in this book. Jump directly to this chapter if you need to get something simple up and running quickly.

Chapter 5 introduces CDO and lays the foundation for understanding its use. It introduces the concept of object model and examines the CDO object model in particular.

Chapter 6 gives practical instruction in using CDO to send and receive email, including email with attachments, formatted text, and embedded ...