Skip to main content

Using Monad to query an Exchange Mailbox via WebDAV to display Unread Emails

I’ve had a chance this week to play around a bit more with MSH and the .NET 2.0 framework and thought I’d share this sample that uses the .net framework to query an Exchange mailbox via WebDAV to display the number of unread email in a mailbox and the subject of the unread email. One of the good things with monad is that you can use both Com and .NET objects pretty easy so all the Microsoft.http browser object stuff will still work but its better to use the new stuff whenever you can. Vivek and Lee Holmes have come up with a good sample of doing a http get using Monad. This helped along with the basic .NET sample from the Exchange SDK in coming up with a simple script that queries an Exchange mailbox using the currently logged on users credentials for any email that is unread. The query itself is a simple WebDAV search that looks for any mail in the inbox folder where the urn:schemas:httpmail:read property is false.

The script itself takes two command-line parameters which is the servername and the mailbox alias (in Exchange 2003 you could use the email address). Eg to run the script you can use displayunread.msh servername mailboxalias (or displayunread.msh servername address@domain.com in Exchange 2003 would work)

I put a downloadable copy of the script here the code itself looks like


param([String] $servername = $(throw "Please specify the Servername"),
[String] $mailbox = $(throw "Please specify a Mailbox"))
$strRootURI = "http://" + $servername + "/exchange/" + $mailbox + "/inbox"
$strQuery = "<?xml version=`"1.0`"?><D:searchrequest xmlns:D = `"DAV:`" ><D:sql>
SELECT `"DAV:displayname`",`"urn:schemas:httpmail:subject`" FROM scope('shallow
traversal of `"" + $strRootURI + "`"')
Where `"DAV:ishidden`" = False AND `"DAV:isfolder`" = False AND
`"urn:schemas:httpmail:read`" = false</D:sql></D:searchrequest>"
$WDRequest = [System.Net.WebRequest]::Create($strRootURI)
$WDRequest.ContentType = "text/xml"
$WDRequest.Headers.Add("Translate", "F")
$WDRequest.Method = "SEARCH"
$WDRequest.UseDefaultCredentials = $True
$bytes = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($strQuery)
$WDRequest.ContentLength = $bytes.Length
$RequestStream = $WDRequest.GetRequestStream()
$RequestStream.Write($bytes, 0, $bytes.Length)
$RequestStream.Close()
$WDResponse = $WDRequest.GetResponse()
$ResponseStream = $WDResponse.GetResponseStream()
$ResponseXmlDoc = new-object System.Xml.XmlDocument
$ResponseXmlDoc.Load($ResponseStream)
$DisplayNameNodes = $ResponseXmlDoc.GetElementsByTagName("d:subject")
""
"Number of Unread Email : " + $DisplayNameNodes.Count
$DisplayNameNodes

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 Graph is limited to a m
Read more

Sending a Message in Exchange Online via REST from an Arduino MKR1000

This is part 2 of my MKR1000 article, in this previous post  I looked at sending a Message via EWS using Basic Authentication.  In this Post I'll look at using the new Outlook REST API  which requires using OAuth authentication to get an Access Token. The prerequisites for this sketch are the same as in the other post with the addition of the ArduinoJson library  https://github.com/bblanchon/ArduinoJson  which is used to parse the Authentication Results to extract the Access Token. Also the SSL certificates for the login.windows.net  and outlook.office365.com need to be uploaded to the devices using the wifi101 Firmware updater. To use Token Authentication you need to register an Application in Azure https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/add-common-consent-manually  with the Mail.Send permission. The application should be a Native Client app that use the Out of Band Callback urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob. You need to authorize it in you tenant (eg build a small ap
Read more

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
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.