Enumerating Public Folders using EWS and reporting on Rules and Folder Stats

When people mention Public Folders in Exchange a quote from Mark Twain often comes to mind "the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated", one often thinks the same when people write such things about email. While Groups in Office 365 offer a compelling alternative, Public Folders are still things Admins need to deal with and Migrate occasionally.

While the Exchange Management Shell cmdlets for reporting on Public Folders have improved a lot in Exchange 2013 you may still have the need from time to time to want to do some more in-depth analysis of what's happening in your Public Folders which is where EWS can come in very useful. The one big difference to reporting on folders in a Public Folder Tree vs doing the same thing in a Mailbox is that in a Public Folder tree you can't do a Deep Traversal. This means to report on Public Folders you need to enumerate the child folders of each parent folder with a separate EWS call. For very large Public Folder trees this can take a considerable amount of time.

The following Script does this enumeration for all the Public Folders (that the Mailbox that is running the script) has access to, it checks to see if there are any Rules that are Active or Disabled, and also produces a basic stats report of the Number of Items, FolderSize and also the PidTagLocalCommitTimeMax time which should give you the last time the items in the folder where last changed. eg it produces something like

With this base you can add-in whatever you want to do with each folder depending on your particular requirements.

I've put a copy of this script on GitHub here https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/blob/master/PublicFolderMod.ps1

To Run the script you need to pass in a Mailbox this is used to connect to CAS server and then connect eg

Enum-PublicFolders -MailboxName mailbox@domain.com

Testing and Sending email via SMTP using Opportunistic TLS and oAuth in Office365 with PowerShell

As well as EWS and Remote PowerShell (RPS) other mail protocols POP3, IMAP and SMTP have had OAuth authentication enabled in Exchange Online (Official announcement here ). A while ago I created this script that used Opportunistic TLS to perform a Telnet style test against a SMTP server using SMTP AUTH. Now that oAuth authentication has been enabled in office365 I've updated this script to be able to use oAuth instead of SMTP Auth to test against Office365. I've also included a function to actually send a Message. Token Acquisition To Send a Mail using oAuth you first need to get an Access token from Azure AD there are plenty of ways of doing this in PowerShell. You could use a library like MSAL or ADAL (just google your favoured method) or use a library less approach which I've included with this script . Whatever way you do this you need to make sure that your application registration https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/quickstart-register-

The MailboxConcurrency limit and using Batching in the Microsoft Graph API

If your getting an error such as Application is over its MailboxConcurrency limit while using the Microsoft Graph API this post may help you understand why. Background The Mailbox concurrency limit when your using the Graph API is 4 as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/throttling#outlook-service-limits . This is evaluated for each app ID and mailbox combination so this means you can have different apps running under the same credentials and the poor behavior of one won't cause the other to be throttled. If you compared that to EWS you could have up to 27 concurrent connections but they are shared across all apps on a first come first served basis. Batching Batching in the Graph API is a way of combining multiple requests into a single HTTP request. Batching in the Exchange Mail API's EWS and MAPI has been around for a long time and its common, for email Apps to process large numbers of smaller items for a variety of reasons. Batching in the Graph is limited to a m

How to test SMTP using Opportunistic TLS with Powershell and grab the public certificate a SMTP server is using

Most email services these day employ Opportunistic TLS when trying to send Messages which means that wherever possible the Messages will be encrypted rather then the plain text legacy of SMTP. This method was defined in RFC 3207 "SMTP Service Extension for Secure SMTP over Transport Layer Security" and there's a quite a good explanation of Opportunistic TLS on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunistic_TLS . This is used for both Server to Server (eg MTA to MTA) and Client to server (Eg a Message client like Outlook which acts as a MSA) the later being generally Authenticated. Basically it allows you to have a normal plain text SMTP conversation that is then upgraded to TLS using the STARTTLS verb. Not all servers will support this verb so if its not supported then a message is just sent as Plain text. TLS relies on PKI certificates and the administrative issue s that come around certificate management like expired certificates which is why I wrote th

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