Skip to main content

Firing an event whenever a new Public folder is created

I was talking with someone this week about an issue where they wanted to maintain the functionality that existed pre going into native mode on Exchange 2003 that would allow public folders to be mail enabled and hidden from the Address list by default. Now there are a lot of good reasons why this is no longer the default action within Exchange but there are also some reasons why you may want this to still happen on a branch of your public folder tree. An event sink might be an obvious way to go about this but because an event sink can only have a shallow match scope on the default public folder tree there not a good choice for this job unless you only want this to work on one folder and not child folders.

What you can do however using the Exchange_PublicFolder WMI class is setup something that will listen for Instance creation events which will happen when a new public folder is created then check the path where the folder is being created and then if you want to have that folder mail-enabled use the WMI IsMailEnabled and PublishInAddressBook properties which are read/write. You could also monitor the _InstanceOperationEvent which would pickup every operation in a public folder but the number of events on busy exchange server would be excessive and you may would pay a large performance penalty. The creation event if setup correctly should only every catch new folder creations. A sample script to do this would look like the following the script checks to see if the folder is being created in the help desk branch of the public folder tree and then mail enables and hides the folder from the Gal via WMI.

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & _
strComputer & "\root\MicrosoftExchangeV2")
Set colMonitoredEvents = objWMIService.ExecNotificationQuery _
("SELECT * FROM __InstanceCreationEvent WITHIN 10 WHERE " _
& "Targetinstance ISA 'Exchange_PublicFolder' ")
Do
Set objLatestEvent = colMonitoredEvents.NextEvent
path = objLatestEvent.TargetInstance.path
if instr(path,"/help desk/") then
objLatestEvent.TargetInstance.PublishInAddressBook = false
objLatestEvent.TargetInstance.IsMailEnabled = true
objLatestEvent.TargetInstance.Put_()
wscript.echo "Mail Enabled Folder : " & path
end if
Loop

Popular posts from this blog

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...

Sending a MimeMessage via the Microsoft Graph using the Graph SDK, MimeKit and MSAL

One of the new features added to the Microsoft Graph recently was the ability to create and send Mime Messages (you have been able to get Message as Mime for a while). This is useful in a number of different scenarios especially when trying to create a Message with inline Images which has historically been hard to do with both the Graph and EWS (if you don't use MIME). It also opens up using SMIME for encryption and a more easy migration path for sending using SMTP in some apps. MimeKit is a great open source library for parsing and creating MIME messages so it offers a really easy solution for tackling this issue. The current documentation on Send message via MIME lacks any real sample so I've put together a quick console app that use MSAL, MIME kit and the Graph SDK to send a Message via MIME. As the current Graph SDK also doesn't support sending via MIME either there is a workaround for this in the future my guess is this will be supported.

Export calendar Items to a CSV file using Microsoft Graph and Powershell

For the last couple of years the most constantly popular post by number of views on this blog has been  Export calendar Items to a CSV file using EWS and Powershell closely followed by the contact exports scripts. It goes to show this is just a perennial issue that exists around Mail servers, I think the first VBS script I wrote to do this type of thing was late 90's against Exchange 5.5 using cdo 1.2. Now it's 2020 and if your running Office365 you should really be using the Microsoft Graph API to do this. So what I've done is create a PowerShell Module (and I made it a one file script for those that are more comfortable with that format) that's a port of the EWS script above that is so popular. This script uses the ADAL library for Modern Authentication (which if you grab the library from the PowerShell gallery will come down with the module). Most EWS properties map one to one with the Graph and the Graph actually provides better information on recurrences then...
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.