(Outlook) Creating custom "message rules" for Outlook Express

Hi: I'm a fair-to-middling VB6 programmer (the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know). I haven't done any VBA before, but I'm comfortable with VB.

I'd like to create custom message rules for Outlook & Outlook Express. For Example, I'd like to forward all messages in Chinese to a separate folder.

Here are some newbie-type questions:

1). How can you tie into the message before it's added to the Outlook inbox (to filter it)?
2). What type of code would be necessary to examine the CharacterSet of the message? Would you just parse the message, or is there a more direct way?

Thanks!!

in the email header you should be able to use the content-type header to return the character set
you can use the winsock control to connect directly to the mail server, but this will not affect where outlook /outlook express put the mail when they retrieve it you can create rules within those mail clients that can check for many things, the closest in outlook express is where the message body contains specific words, within outlook you could make new rules programatically, but not within outlook express