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Are there .NET Framework methods to parse an email (MIME)?

Answer 1

+2 A:

I know you said no external libraries, but I have a library posted on codeplex:

http://mailutilities.codeplex.com/

MimeMessage msg = new MimeMessage(/* string, stream, or Byte[] */);

It has been tested with over 40,000 real-world mail messages.

I'm not too happy with my namespace choice, but... I'm too lazy to change it.

PS:

Internally, my library users these regexes as a parser:

internal static string FullMessageMatch =
    @"\A(?<header>(?:[^\r\n]+\r\n)*)(?<header_term>\r\n)(?<body>.*)\z";
internal static string HeadersMatch =
    @"^(?<header_key>[-A-Za-z0-9]+)(?<seperator>:[ \t]*)(?<header_value>([^\r\n]|\r\n[ \t]+)*)(?<terminator>\r\n)";
internal static string HeaderSeperator =
    "\r\n";
internal static string KeyValueSeparator =
    @"\A:[ \t]*\z";

John Gietzen 2009-11-03 20:06:34

John, instead of using your library perhaps he could use a class or two out of your source?

Paul Sasik 2009-11-03 20:24:48

Yes, Absolutely.

John Gietzen 2009-11-03 20:25:11

Answer 2

A:

You could try .Net Regex functionality. Raw MIME should fall into a pretty regular pattern that is simple to Regex parse. Especially given your simple requirements.

Paul Sasik 2009-11-03 20:19:30

This is definitely not true. It is not possible to parse correctly MIME syntax using regex. Regular expressions are not designed for context-free grammar.

Pawel Lesnikowski 2009-11-05 10:00:50

@Pawel: Look at the leading answer. John has a library that uses RegEx to parse MIME messages. And btw MIME has to have a some discernable pattern. How else could email be interpreted by different servers and clients? And if there is a pattern, RegEx can be used.

Paul Sasik 2009-11-05 14:22:05

@psasik Let me give you an example: you are not able to extract value from the following pattern: any number of '(' followed by some string and then by the same number of ')'. For instance: "((value))", "(value)" but not from "(((value))". Although you can use RegExp, you are not able to determine that "(((value))" is in fact something different. In general there are languages that can be generated by a context-free grammar that cannot be generated by any regular expression.

Pawel Lesnikowski 2009-11-09 11:49:11

Answer 3

A:

No, there is no way to do that yet. Microsoft has not created a Text-to-Message convertor just as they haven't created a POP3 or IMAP library. Unfortunate.

James Bailey 2009-11-03 20:29:56

Answer 4

A:

Check out Mail.dll .NET mail component, it has build in MIME support, unicode, and multi-national email support:

MailBuilder builder = new MailBuilder();

// Here you get the message class with attachments, visuals
IMail message = builder.CreateFromEml(File.ReadAllText("test.eml"));

// you can access entire MIME document:
MimeDocument document = message.Document;

Please note that Mail.dll is a commercial product that I've created.

You can download it here: http://www.lesnikowski.com/mail.

Pawel Lesnikowski 2009-11-05 10:54:56

Answer 5

A:

Hi,

check out our Rebex Secure Mail which includes a (IMHO) decent S/MIME parser. Features include:

High level MailMessage API (message as seen in common email client)
Low level MimeMessage API (access to S/MIME internal tree)
Support for both MIME, S/MIME
Support for TNEF (winmail.dat) produced by Microsoft Outlook
Message encryption
Message signing
Unicode and internationalization support
Linked resources list (used for inline CSS and pictures in HTML mails)
IEnumerable<T> support (needed for LINQ)
supports all .NET and .NET compact frameworks released until today

The parser is part of Rebex Secure Mail and you can download it here.

Martin Vobr 2009-12-01 16:37:31

Answer 6

+1 A:

I recommend IMAP and MIME parser libs from Lumisoft. Which I used before and its easy to work with. You can download it from here: http://www.lumisoft.ee/lsWWW/Download/Downloads/Net/ The lib has many other protocols like ftp, pop3, etc and I'm sure the sc is available. Try to google for it, also you can find it on codeproject.com regards

Thiganofx 2009-12-01 16:48:48

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Are there .NET Framework methods to parse an email (MIME)?

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