Skip to main content

Importing Entries into Safe Senders, Safe Recipients and Blocked Senders via Script

Outlook 2003 and OWA (Exchange 2003) have the ability to create and maintain White/Black lists that work in conjunction with the IMF to filter Spam.Now that I'm using the IMF to do my spam management theses personal white lists have come up as an issue. Sometimes its necessary to globally white list an address or domain for all users or upload a number of entries into one users whitelist or ensure that as new mailboxes get created any necessary white-list entries get created for users. So a script or programmatic way to do this becomes a bit of a necessity. From a server perspective the lists are all stored in a binary property on a message in the users inbox (junk E-mail rule), so you can use Exoledb and Webdav to get at this property but because its just a binary blob of data decoding and/or adding to it from a script would be quite hard (not that I didn't try).

One solution that I found that works is to re-use some OWA commands in a script using the XML parser (Microsoft.XMLHTTP). Q290591 describes a method you can use to post information to web pages using the XMLHTTP object. What you can do is take this and apply it to OWA, Eg: When you add users to the safe senders list in OWA it posts the following data to the web server.

"cmd=savejunkemailrule"
"addtots=user@domain;"

For Safe Recipients its "addtotr=user@domain;" and for Blocked Senders it "addtojs=user@domain;" (I was so disappointed it wasn't addtobs ).

So to create a script that adds 3 entries to the Trusted Senders list and also enables the junk email filtering check box in OWA the script looks like below.
Note this only works if you aren't using FBA on your mailbox server,

xmlstr = ""
xmlstr = xmlstr & "Cmd=options" & vbLf
xmlstr = xmlstr & "junkemailstate=1" & vbLf
xmlstr = xmlstr & "cmd=savejunkemailrule" & vbLf
xmlstr = xmlstr & "addtots=user@domain;@domain1.com;@domain2.com;"
Set ObjxmlHttp = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
ObjxmlHttp.Open "POST", "http://yourserver/exchange/yourmailbox/", False, "", ""
ObjxmlHttp.setRequestHeader "Accept-Language:", "en-us"
ObjxmlHttp.setRequestHeader "Content-type:", "application/x-www-UTF8-encoded"
ObjxmlHttp.setRequestHeader "Content-Length:", Len(xmlstr)
ObjxmlHttp.Send xmlstr
Wscript.echo ObjxmlHttp.responseText

Popular posts from this blog

Exporting and Uploading Mailbox Items using Exchange Web Services using the new ExportItems and UploadItems operations in Exchange 2010 SP1

Two new EWS Operations ExportItems and UploadItems where introduced in Exchange 2010 SP1 that allowed you to do a number of useful things that where previously not possible using Exchange Web Services. Any object that Exchange stores is basically a collection of properties for example a message object is a collection of Message properties, Recipient properties and Attachment properties with a few meta properties that describe the underlying storage thrown in. Normally when using EWS you can access these properties in a number of a ways eg one example is using the strongly type objects such as emailmessage that presents the underlying properties in an intuitive way that's easy to use. Another way is using Extended Properties to access the underlying properties directly. However previously in EWS there was no method to access every property of a message hence there is no way to export or import an item and maintain full fidelity of every property on that item (you could export the...
Read more

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 Gr...
Read more

EWS-FAI Module for browsing and updating Exchange Folder Associated Items from PowerShell

Folder Associated Items are hidden Items in Exchange Mailbox folders that are commonly used to hold configuration settings for various Mailbox Clients and services that use Mailboxes. Some common examples of FAI's are Categories,OWA Signatures and WorkHours there is some more detailed documentation in the https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc463899(v=exchg.80).aspx protocol document. In EWS these configuration items can be accessed via the UserConfiguration operation https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dd899439(v=exchg.150).aspx which will give you access to either the RoamingDictionary, XMLStream or BinaryStream data properties that holds the configuration depending on what type of FAI data is being stored. I've written a number of scripts over the years that target particular FAI's (eg this one that reads the workhours  http://gsexdev.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/finding-timezone-being-used-in-mailbox.html is a good example ) but I didn't have a gene...
Read more
All sample scripts and source code is provided by for illustrative purposes only. All examples are untested in different environments and therefore, I cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or function of these programs.

All code contained herein is provided to you "AS IS" without any warranties of any kind. The implied warranties of non-infringement, merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are expressly disclaimed.