LINQ to Email Data

This article illustrates using LINQ to access tables within the Email via the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for Email. To achieve this, we will use LINQ to Entity Framework, which facilitates the generation of connections and can be seamlessly employed with any CData ADO.NET Data Providers to access data through LINQ.

See the help documentation for a guide to setting up an EF 6 project to use the provider.

1. In a new project in Visual Studio, right-click on the project and choose to add a new item. Add an ADO.NET Entity Data Model.
2. Choose EF Designer from Database and click Next.
3. Add a new Data Connection, and change your data source type to "CData Email Data Source".

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, must be set to valid credentials. The Server must be specified to retrieve emails and the SMTPServer must be specified to send emails.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   [email protected];Password=password;Server=imap.gmail.com;Port=993;SMTP Server=smtp.gmail.com;SMTP Port=465;SSL Mode=EXPLICIT;Protocol=IMAP;Mailbox=Inbox;

👁 Required connection properties for the data source. (QuickBooks is shown.)

5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting EmailEntities as our entity connection in App.Config.
6. Enter a model name and select any tables or views you would like to include in the model.

Using the entity you created, you can now perform select , update, delete, and insert commands. For example:

EmailEntities context = new EmailEntities();

var mailboxesQuery = from mailboxes in context.Mailboxes
 select mailboxes;

foreach (var result in mailboxesQuery) {
 Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Mailbox);
}

See "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation for example queries of the supported LINQ.