Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

On Exchange servers pre Exchange 2010 when someone deletes an Item in Exchange it goes via the dumpster 1.0. Which is explained in http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/09/25/452632.aspx as " essentially a view stored per folder. Items in the dumpster (henceforth known as Dumpster 1.0) stay in the folder where they were soft-deleted (shift-delete or delete from Deleted Items) and are stamped with the ptagDeletedOnFlag flag. " . Being able to report on the items that are stored in these views can be useful for a number of auditing and admin reasons. With Exchange Web Services you query the items stored in these views using a SoftDeleted traversal of the folder in question. This works well for items that are stored in the dumpster of a normal mailbox folder but there is a problem when you have a hierarchy of folders that gets deleted. When this happens you can only query the first of the deleted hierarchy using a soft deleted traversal and the findfolders operation. W...

As time passes we all receive more and more email, this is one of the irrefutable facts of life for any mail system or anybody with a mailbox. Even the most fastidious of deleters still can't avoid this so at some point in the future you may need to consider achieving. The fact is your users maybe already self archiving using PST files which like self medicating can lead to serious problems down the track when their laptop goes under a bus. Exchange 2010 introduced native achieving and SP1 when its released will build on these capabilities, for other versions of exchange there are a bunch of other fine products you can look at to do this. If your looking to ingest PST's into an online archive you may want to first review what content your going to be importing and look at things like how many attachments and what type are they and how old is the content to give you a feel for what your going to be storing and potentially having to backup. What this boils down to is if you wan...

One of the great new features of Exchange Web Services on Exchange 2010 is the ability to use AQS (Advanced Query Syntax) when querying a mailbox folder. The reason this is helpful is that it provides an easily assessable entrypoint into the Exchange Search Service. The Exchange Search Service has been constantly improving with each new version of Exchange when you consider the size and Item counts of the modern mailbox this has now become a vital component of Exchange and something that those using EWS should consider taking advantage of. For the basics behind the difference between a Store Search and one use that utilizes the Exchange Search Service the Exchange Team blog has a great three part post on the subject. The main points of interest are that index searches are considerable quicker and can be used to do things such as look at the content of an attachment which a normal store search can not do. Of course there are also a number of things a store search can do...

Last month i posted a script for getting the Iphone IOS version information for all users on a server using the Get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics cmdlet which worked okay but had one major flaw in that it doesn't pick up the updates to the O/S as pointed out in http://www.hedonists.ca/2010/07/22/blocking-the-iphone-part-i. So the only 100% way would be to parse the IIS logs where you can grab the same information about the devices as long as the cs-useragent is being include in the logs (if not you need to change this). This script is still useful for somethings and hopefully i should be able to re-purpose this to do something useful. There are good and bad things about parsing logs, the good is that this technique should work on any version of Exchange including 2003 the bad is that if your log files are large then there are much better ways then using Powershell to parse them (such as logparser). But using PS does have a number of advantages and if your whiling to wait while the s...

After working for my last employer for a very long time (over a decade in relatively the same job and location) a couple of weeks okay I finally finished up there in the hope of establishing a better work/life balance. So if your in need a of a overly creative Exchange Engineer/Developer/Scripter send me an email glenscales@yahoo.com no job too big or small :) . Cheers Glen

I recently switched to a new Laptop which had Windows7 which left me in a little bit of a hole as to how i could get access to some old email which i needed rather urgently that was located in a dbx file from a previous laptop where I had been using Outlook Express for a number of years. I found http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/convert_oe.htm which had a acceptable method of doing this but I thought I'd like to push this email into a Exchange Mailbox anyway so i decided to see if i could do this programmaticly. Turns out there is no real API that makes access t0 DBX files easy however a few people over the years have come up with methods to access these files, there is a PHP dbxparser which someone has also ported to C# on code-project here this was enough information to allow me to build a simple DLL that i could then use in Powershell to extract email and then using some simple code to upload the email into Exchange using the MIMEContent upload technique with EWS. In the end t...