Getting attributes from Outlook messages

Some background first.

I have developed a reasonably comprehensive projects application over
the past 5 years that holds all my companies project/client
information (small Engineering/Information Managment consultancy)

This application has a basic document management capability using
automation with Word and Excel to create new documents and
automatically save them in a pre-defined folder hierarchy based on the
project number. My automation code uses the following standard naming
convention when saving documents:

projNo-yymmdd-nn-xxx-from-description

where yymmdd is date
nn = unique counter for multiple files on same day
xxx = INW (inward), OUT (outgoing), INF (info/data)
from = who from

I've also added some code so I can rename existing files in these
folders so I can quickly rename other files that have been save in the
folder but not using my automation code. This code gets the filesystem
date for the yymmdd component of the standard naming convention.

Whats missing in all this is managing Outlook messages and
attachments.

I'm running Outlook 2000 and 2007 with pst files and there is many
years of data sitting in pst files ranging is size from 300mb to over
1gb.

I have decided the best way to handle Outlook messages is to take them
out of the pst file so I'm not vulnerable to the pst file being
corrupted, and save the individual messages in my project folder so
they are accessible by anybody.

So what I've done is written some code and a custom form in Outlook so
that when you opn the message in Outlook you can click on a button and
the custom form pops up asking for the project number. You enter the
project number and the message is saved in the appropriate folder
(Each project gets a folder where all other project related files are
saved.) This works great (except for the known bug in Outlook 2000
that causes custom toolbars to randomly disappear).

My renaming code even works with these msg files except they get the
creation date of the file rather than the received date of the
message.

So now heres the question? How can I get the received date of the
message when the message file is in a folder rather than an object in
the Outlook pst file???

Cheers

Grant








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