If you would like to dial your mail provider every 12 hours and download your messages to your personal folders, you need MAPI Download. MAPI Download connects and downloads messages without ever starting the Exchange or Outlook mail client, making it suitable for running from many scheduler programs. Like MAPI Logon, it allows you to specify the profile to use on the command line.
The profile you specify must contain a default message store as a destination for the messages, and must contain message transport providers for each message service that it will poll.
I haven't tested this at all on Remote Mail services.
Certain transport providers, such as MSN, require that you click a button in order to connect, even if you've given the transport provider your password to use on your behalf. This makes MAPI Download much less useful with these transports, though you can use one of the many shareware and freeware button-pressing utilities to work around this.
The Microsoft Internet Mail service provider does not like to run in multiple instances at once, e.g. if MAPI Download fetches Internet mail through one profile while Exchange fetches or sends it through another.
You may not use the Windows NT AT command to run MAPI Download.
Download mfetch.zip (available in both Intel and Alpha flavors) from this Web page, and unzip it. Copy the executable mfetch.exe anywhere that you like. Check your system directory for the file msvcrt40.dll on Alpha, or msvcrt.dll version 4.20.6201 on Intel; if you lack this, see the runtime installation instructions. Create a profile containing the desired destination message store as the default store, and containing each transport needed. Specify this profile when running the utility.
Delete the file mfetch.exe, together with any shortcuts or batch files that reference it.
Like MAPI Logon, MAPI Download is designed to work from desktop or folder shortcuts, or by having another application spawn it. It accepts a number of command-line switches that control its behavior.
The /p switch is mandatory, naming the profile to use for logon. If the name of the profile contains spaces, surround it with quotes.
The /c switch allows you to specify a credential string for use at logon. Most systems do not use this.
The /q switch makes MAPI Download suppress its user interface while downloading messages. This is useful when running MAPI Download from a scheduled script while a user is at the keyboard, since it prevents the Checking for new messages prompt from stealing the keyboard focus from the user's foreground application.
The /? switch gives a brief summary of the program.
Note that MAPI Download, true to its name, only downloads messages.
There is one very important bug that I must commend to your attention. It is not in MAPI Download, MAPI, or Exchange, but instead apparently lies in Windows 95 PPP. It doesn't bite everybody, and those that it does bite it doesn't bite every time; but if it does bite you you'll ache for a while. I list it here only because MAPI Download makes it dangerous.
Briefly, certain sites using Windows 95 have reported that their systems occasionally lock up solidly - requiring reset or cycling the power - when they disconnect a PPP session. If you use MAPI Download to download your messages, and it activates the Internet Mail service provider and lets that establish the PPP connection as necessary, then the service provider will disconnect the PPP session immediately after downloading your messages. Should this PPP bug strike you, you will lose all messages downloaded, since the system will lock up before the file system flushes its data to the disk.
If, like most sites, you've never had your system lock up on hangup, then you're safe, and may use MAPI Download with impunity. However, if you have seen this happen before, you should always establish the PPP session by hand, explicitly starting a session through Dial-Up Networking; that way, should hangup slag your system, you'll have given your data the time it needs to migrate to the disk.
Installing the Windows 95 Kernel Update patch seems to make the problem appear less frequently. Installing Windows NT eliminates the problem completely.
If you run two programs simultaneously downloading Internet Mail from different POP providers, you can crash MAPI. Workaround: don't do that.
MAPI Download gives no indication as to whether it found any new messages.
MAPI Download will not work correctly if invoked from a Windows NT service, such as the scheduling service used by the NT AT command. (Theoretically, I could correct this shortcoming, but the corrected version would work only with the Exchange Server message service provider. Limitations of the MAPI architecture would prevent this from working with the providers that most clients of this tool use, such as CompuServe or Internet Mail.)
Last modified: 13 August 1998
Copyright 1996-1998 Ben Goetter. All rights reserved.