Send email with FROM field in Matlab - matlab

Question

I am trying to add the field FROM in my matlab function to send an email with outlook.
This function works (without the from):
function sendolmail(to,subject,body,attachments, from)
%Sends email using MS Outlook. The format of the function is
%Similar to the SENDMAIL command.
% Create object and set parameters.
h = actxserver('outlook.Application');
mail = h.CreateItem('olMail');
mail.Subject = subject;
mail.To = to;
mail.BodyFormat = 'olFormatHTML';
mail.HTMLBody = body;
% THIS PART DOES NOT WORK
if nargin ==5
mail.From = from;
end
% Add attachments, if specified.
if nargin == 4
for i = 1:length(attachments)
mail.attachments.Add(attachments{i});
end
end
% Send message and release object.
mail.Send;
h.release;
However, when I add from then I get the error:
No public property From exists for class
Interface.00063034_0000_0000_C000_000000000046.

Answer 1

As already stated, there is no From attribute in MailItem objects. There are many attributes referring to the sender: Sender, SenderEmailAddress, SenderEmailType, SenderName... but all of them, except Sender, are read-only. This means they cannot be set, and you must rely uniquely on the Sender property, which accept object instances of type AddressEntry.
I'm not sure that this will work, because such mechanic would be easily abused by malicious users... but you can try the following:
if (nargin == 5)
recipient = h.Session.CreateRecipient(from);
mail.Sender = recipient.AddressEntry;
end

Answer 2

Here are all the properties of the MailItem class, which is what you are creating through this interface: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.interop.outlook.mailitem_members.aspx
It looks like you need to set either Sender or SendUsingAccount. However, since neither of these take strings, you'll have to retrieve an object of the appropriate type using the matlab interface. It seems to me that you should be able to use
mail.SendUsingAccount= h.Session.Accounts.Item(3); %Select the third account
to set this property; however, it seems like there may be some issues with that, according to this source. Unfortunately, I don't have outlook setup, some I'm not able to try it myself.