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

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 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.
Read more

EWS-FAI Module for browsing and updating Exchange Folder Associated Items from PowerShell

Folder Associated Items are hidden Items in Exchange Mailbox folders that are commonly used to hold configuration settings for various Mailbox Clients and services that use Mailboxes. Some common examples of FAI's are Categories,OWA Signatures and WorkHours there is some more detailed documentation in the https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc463899(v=exchg.80).aspx protocol document. In EWS these configuration items can be accessed via the UserConfiguration operation https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dd899439(v=exchg.150).aspx which will give you access to either the RoamingDictionary, XMLStream or BinaryStream data properties that holds the configuration depending on what type of FAI data is being stored. I've written a number of scripts over the years that target particular FAI's (eg this one that reads the workhours  http://gsexdev.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/finding-timezone-being-used-in-mailbox.html is a good example ) but I didn't have a gene...
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.