Retrieve Current Email Body In Outlook

Question

in my outlook addin I want to add a button on the Ribbon so when user click this button I want to retrieve the current selected email's body , I have this code but it retrieve only the first email from the inbox because the index is 1 :

Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application myApp = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application();
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.NameSpace mapiNameSpace = myApp.GetNamespace("MAPI");
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MAPIFolder myInbox = mapiNameSpace.GetDefaultFolder(Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderInbox);
String body = ((Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MailItem)myInbox.Items[1]).Body;

so how to retrieve the current opened email in outlook? , this method work for me but I need to get the index for the current email.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You shouldn’t initialize a new Outlook.Application() instance each time. Most add-in frameworks provide you with an Outlook.Application instance, corresponding to the current Outlook session, typically through a field or property named Application. You are expected to use this for the lifetime of your add-in.

To get the currently-selected item, use:

Outlook.Explorer explorer = this.Application.ActiveExplorer();
Outlook.Selection selection = explorer.Selection;

if (selection.Count > 0)   // Check that selection is not empty.
{
    object selectedItem = selection[1];   // Index is one-based.
    Outlook.MailItem mailItem = selectedItem as Outlook.MailItem;

    if (mailItem != null)    // Check that selected item is a message.
    {
        // Process mail item here.
    }
}

Note that the above will let you process the first selected item. If you have multiple items selected, you might want to process them in a loop.