Parse pasted images from Outlook emails as attachments in Sharepoint list

Question

I have a Sharepoint list with incoming email enabled, and an email event receiver to create items out of incoming emails. Once an email is received, it sends an email back to the sender with the contents as a confirmation.

You can send an attachment and the receiver will add the attachment to the list item, but most users paste screenshots into emails instead of attaching saved images (easier).

Is there a way to parse these pasted images and add them to the list item as an attachment?

Answer 1

This is probably a good place to start:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3691877/regex-to-find-in-line-images-in-a-plain-text-email-message

Once you can decode the image (look at the example return data here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4332400/python-parsing-emails-with-embedded-images) then it's a matter of simply adding the image as an attachment.

One of the big issues you're going to run into is making this work with email from all email clients, as different clients use different formatting.

As far as uploading it as an attachment to the list, see this post:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1334695/sharepoint-how-to-add-an-attachment-to-a-list-item-programatically

And here's the code snippet:

foreach (FileInfo attachment in attachments)
{
    FileStream fs = new FileStream(attachment.FullName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read);

    byte[] ImageData = new byte[fs.Length];
    fs.Read(ImageData, 0, System.Convert.ToInt32(fs.Length));
    fs.Close();

    item.Attachments.Add(attachment.Name, ImageData); 
}