Is it possible to implement IMAP/POP3 protocol in .NET without any 3rd party DLL?

Question

Hi,

I am Selvam. I want to develop a stand-alone application in .NET to retrieve e-mail using IMAP/POP3. I dont know it is possible to implement without 3rd party DLL. If possible kindly tell me how to do that?

Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Selvam S

Sam Hobbs · Answer

You don't need to go far for POP3; this web site has at least one article about it. I have written programs to at least check mail to determine if mail is available. The hard part is to check multiple servers at the same time; in other words asynchronously in threads. If you only need to do one at a time then it is easy. You can even use Telnet to retrieve email using POP3 but it is not something you would want to do often. The POP3 standard is at: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1939.txt I don't know about IMAP; it is quite complicated. I think the relevant standard is at: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3501.txt However there are many other RFCs relevant to IMAP; go to ietf.org and search if you need to.

Vulpes · Answer

There's no .NET Framework support for either IMAP or POP3 and so you have to write at the TCP layer in order to receive mail from servers which use these protocols. Unless you know enough about it to write your own, you'll need the help of a third party library for IMAP. However, POP3 is relatively simple and it's not difficult to write your own code. Check out this article ( http://www.developerfusion.com/article/4071/how-to-pop3-in-c/2/ ) for details.

Suthish Nair · Answer

If you are looking for MS Outlook Integration with C# - Reading Mails