Extract metadata from Emails

To extract metadata from emails GetMetadata method is used. This method allows to extract the following metadata:

NameDescription
subjectThe email “subject” field.
email-senderThe email “from” field.
email-toThe email “to” field. May contain more than one address separated by semicolons.
email-ccThe email “cc” field. May contain more than one address separated by semicolons.

Here are the steps to extract metadata from an email:

  • Instantiate Parser object for the initial email;
  • Call GetMetadata method and obtain collection of document metadata objects;
  • Iterate through the collection and get metadata names and values.
Warning
GetMetadata method returns null value if metadata extraction isn’t supported for the document. For example, metadata extraction isn’t supported for Zip archive. Therefore, for Zip archive GetMetadata method returns null. If an email has no metadata, GetMetadata method returns an empty collection.

The following example demonstrates how to extract metadata from an email:

// Create an instance of Parser class
using(Parser parser = new Parser(filePath))
{
    // Extract metadata from the email
    IEnumerable<MetadataItem> metadata = parser.GetMetadata();
 
    // Iterate over metadata items
    foreach(MetadataItem item in metadata)
    {
        // Print the item name and value
        Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0}: {1}", item.Name, item.Value));
    }
}

More resources

GitHub examples

You may easily run the code above and see the feature in action in our GitHub examples:

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