Skip to main content

Introducing the Data Rumble Message Tracking Outlook AddIn for Office 365

With great pride and a little trepidation I'd like to introduce my new venture Data Rumble and our first software release Message Tracking Outllook Addin for Office 365. As a company we are looking to focus on email data so looking at the Metadata an Email message picks up and leaves behind while its in transit to and from a mailbox is the logical first step for us. Launching something new is a lot of work so this first release is a bit of dry run to get all the underlying infrastructure and procedures in place.

At release the main feature of this AddIn is that it allows you to perform a Message Trace on a Message from within Outlook itself using the Office365 Reporting Web Service. This is a REST endpoint that allows you to perform a number of different Office365 Administrative reporting tasks it has been around for a couple of years now and pre dates some of the oauth features that the newer mailbox REST services have so I expect the Endpoint will change soon  (it also has the option to use PowerShell as an alternative to cater for instances where REST doesn't work). . But from this AddIn's perspective it makes use of this endpoint to perform a Message Trace (that you would normally do in the EAC or PowerShell eg https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/jj200741(v=exchg.150).aspx ) from within Outlook eg. this a screenshot


The Addin post processes the data returned by the Reporting service as well as data extracted from the messages Transport Headers and a few other Message properties and combines those together to provide more information around the message such as the Message header properties, Exchange online protection actions etc (although there is already a good tool for this https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com/ and a corresponding AddIn but this is just another view of the data),Sender and Recipient information. All Message Tracking is done based on the MessageId's extracted from the message in Outlook, it also extracts any associated MessageID's eg if this message is a reply, forward or part of a thread. So you can then query the logs for any associated Messages as well as query for other messages that have been sent or received to and from any of the sender, recipients or envelope recipients found in the log. (envelope recipients would could be BCC's, alternate recipients, forwards or recipients added by a Transport Agent that are available in the Tracing logs). I've created a short video below to showcase the features or you can check and download the software from the product page here.

Labels:

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

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 ...
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.