Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

Last week I blogged this Appointment label Colour Changing Event Sink and I mentioned that the appointment label text is located in the http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x36DC0102 property in an undocumented binary form. Well I had a crack at working out what that format is this week and I've come up with the following sample. Before I start though I must give the following warning, the following piece of code and method is completely unsupported and completely untested. Playing around with binary properties is very unwise unless you really have a good enough grasp to be able to undo any damage you may do trying to set them. The third and last bit is that this will only work if your using the ASCII character set. If you're using other types of character sets (eg a lot of Asian character sets) this wont work. Because this property is stored in a binary format to work with this in VBS we need something that can read binary and convert it to a hex string which makes it u...

[2/2/2005 updated this post and script to use named property instead the custom Mapi prop] One of the cool features that was implemented in Outlook 2002 was the ability to change the colour of appointment labels to help distinguish between different types of appointments. (see http://www.slipstick.com/calendar/colorcal.htm for a good description of this feature). But because of the laziness factor I find that I rarely use this feature because I usually forget to set it. One of the things that I really wanted this to do also was be able to show me at a glace which meetings in my calendar where internal meeting (only contained internal attendees) and which meeting contained external attendees (this can be usefull in the morning). Putting this into an event sink turned out to be a really easy solution. All I needed was some code that would go though the attendees collection of a appointment object when the appointment was created and check each of the address's of the attendees to s...

This question pops up now and again from people who want to be able to scheduled a script that will delete mail in a folder that was received more then say 30 days ago. Typically this could be used on a postmaster mailbox (hopefully people are reading these mails before they get deleted) or on a mailbox that is doing auto replies when you want to keep the original emails for a period of time. Going about this is quite simple in Exoeldb all you really need to do is query on the desired folder for all the mail where the urn:schemas:httpmail:datereceived is older then 30 days. Once you have all these mails in a record set you can loop though the recordset and delete the email. The thing to remember when you are deleting mail this way is that the deleted mail goes into the dumpster of whatever folder you are deleting them from mailboxurl = "file://./backofficestorage/yourdomain/MBX/mailbox/inbox" set Rec = CreateObject("ADODB.Record") set Rs = CreateObject("ADODB.R...

I've blogged about resources in meetings before but this question came up last week about how do you tell which resources have been booked from a calendar request message(meeting invitation). When someone creates a meeting the resources that are booked (or attempting to be booked) with the meeting get stored in the BCC field of the appointment object. In the calendar request messages (invitations) that go out to the users (and resource mailboxes if your using some sort of auto accept system) the resources aren't included in the calendar request message (not even in the recipients collection even when the resource mailbox is receiving the calendar request). If you use Outlook to do the booking it does copy the resources display name into the location property but with OWA the location field is left blank unless the user specifically enters something . So from a calendar request message you received from a meeting organized by OWA how could you tell which resources where being bo...