I want to access ALL of the emails on an email server. It could be an MS Exchange server or a regular IMAP or POP server. How would I do this? I want to programatically access each email and do special text processing and make a statistics report of all emails on a server. [Edited by - andreib on November 18, 2009 11:41:12 AM]

You need to be the proper administrator of the machine and software.

Next, you need to understand how that particular email system works.

Each mail server is different. For example, MS Exchange is very different from the old unix maild, which is different from Exim, which is different from Lotus Domino, etc.

Finally, you need to use the tools provided by the email system to do whatever it is you wanted to do.

frob,

Assuming that I am the administrator to the system, but I want to run my software on another computer (not the email server computer) and access all of the emails. I could have the username and password for the admin email account too.

Quote: Original post by andreib
Assuming that I am the administrator to the system, but I want to run my software on another computer (not the email server computer) and access all of the emails. I could have the username and password for the admin email account too.

It depends on the mail server.

This is basic server administration, so go read the manuals or online tutorials.

Moving to the lounge, as this has pretty much nothing to do with programming.

Writing programs to access multiple mail systems like this is a very non-trivial task: You need to interact with every platform differently depending on that particular system. You'd want to look into MAPI for Exchange servers, Notes API for Domino servers, among many others. I strongly suggest you find a way to limit the scope of the problem you describe.