Access Lotus Notes using Perl via Win32::OLE

Are you a Lotus Notes user? Did you ever wonder how you can extract text out of Lotus Notes using Perl? Here's a script that I wrote to extract notification emails:

use Win32::OLE;

my $server;
my $database;
my $folder;

my $file = "temp_file.csv";

my $ini = "get_emails.ini";
if (-e $ini)
{
    open (INI,$ini) || die "Not able to open $ini: $!\n";
    chomp ($server = );
    chomp ($database = );
    chomp ($folder = );
}
else
{
    print "\nEnter Notes Server: ";
    chomp ($server=);
    print "\nEnter Notes Database: ";
    chomp ($database=);
    print "\nEnter Folder you want to access: ";
    chomp ($folder=);
}

#connect to the Notes database
my $Notes = Win32::OLE->new('Notes.NotesSession') || warn "Cannot start Lotus Notes Session object: $!\n";
my $Database = $Notes->GetDatabase($server, $database);

#Fetch contents of the folder
my $Response = $Database->GetView($folder);
my $Count = $Response->TopLevelEntryCount;
my $Index = $Count;

open (OUT, ">$file");

#loop through all emails
for (1..$Count)
{
    my $Document = $Response->GetNthDocument($Index--);
    my $subject = $Document->GetFirstItem('Subject')->{Text};
    my $body = $Document->GetFirstItem('Body')->{Text};
    print OUT "Subject: $subject\n",
              "Body: $body\n";
}

`start excel.exe $file`;

This works if you have Lotus Notes Client installed on your machine. As you can see the script uses OLE to access your mail database via the client. There is a way to connect to any Lotus Notes database without having to install Lotus Notes. It can be accessed using the ever popular Perl DBI module. The latter is the one that I use to synchronize Lotus Notes databases to Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server. Will discuss more about that... stay tuned.