>>>MAPI is depraced for a while now.
>>
>>Do you mean "deprecated"? If yes, what would you use instead?
>
>Yeap. Updated. Automation.

Automation of what - your current email client? Thunderbird uses the XPCOM interface, which is huge and I have no idea how to use it. Since my task at hand was to make an indexed table of a couple of gigabytes of old emails, I simply went with the low-level reading - the email archives are in the proprietary format called text file (to differ from other proprietary formats which have no names :), so this was easy.

Automation of Outlook, last time I tried, doesn't give you much of the original header, but you get a lot of properties regarding the way email was stored in a sssssh (oooops, pssst) file. The only way I could get the email archives from Outlook to some half-decent archive format was to temporarily install Outlook again, and have Thunderbird extract the emails into the named proprietary format.

Maybe there's a better way, but I got completely frustrated by the UT search here, because almost all messages (and probably the reason for this thread too) are about automated sending and maybe receiving emails, not reading old ones.

There are two levels of MAPI, and it really never lived - most of the apps implement only the basic 12 functions (Thunderbird does, but not all of them really work). I don't remember the level implemented in other email clients, probably none do completely. When I found that MAPI won't give me what I want from Thunderbird (it will read only Inbox - and even then I don't get all the message properties I want), I gave up and went to LLFF.