It is unlikely that you will need to write a full email application from scratch on a regular basis, although it might be your first approach to making a mainframe mail system easier to use. The most common use for MAPI controls is to provide mail functions within other standard applications to produce a mail-aware application. If you have used any of the current Microsoft applications, such as Word, Excel, or Access, you will have seen the Send command in the File menu that allows you to send your current working document, spreadsheet or database as an email directly from within the application.

It is easy to provide this functionality for your VB applications by using the MAPI commands. For example, if you have a telephone order-taking application within VB, and your operators begin to get calls pointing out that the product is twice the price of a rival's gizmo, then you could add a Send command to allow the operator to send a comment to the supervisor.

The Send command would, in this case, only send mail to a predefined user the supervisor and would present a simple edit box for the operator's comment. In this way the Exchange dialog box would be hidden and the message interface would be kept as simple as possible.

The following two routines would work with your existing application and would log into the mail server and then display a simple form with an edit box and...