>Also, there are several examples of using OLE to get to mail in VB and C, in Windows 3.1. Would it be possible (or reasonable, I guess) to use the OCX from VB to do this?

Just use Mabry SMTP & POP Mail OCXs. We are distributing 100000 messages per week from Visual FoxPro with that for the Universal Thread listserv interface. We also use it to get all the incoming new messages.

It's very powerful and fast.