Skip to main content

Enumerating Public Folders using EWS and reporting on Rules and Folder Stats

When people mention Public Folders in Exchange a quote from Mark Twain often comes to mind "the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated", one often thinks the same when people write such things about email.  While Groups in Office 365 offer a compelling alternative, Public Folders are still things Admins need to deal with and Migrate occasionally.

While the Exchange Management Shell cmdlets for reporting on Public Folders have improved a lot in Exchange 2013 you may still have the need from time to time to want to do some more in-depth analysis of what's happening in your Public Folders which is where EWS can come in very useful. The one big difference to reporting on folders in a Public Folder Tree vs doing the same thing in a Mailbox is that in a Public Folder tree you can't do a Deep Traversal. This means to report on Public Folders you need to enumerate the child folders of each parent folder with a separate EWS call. For very large Public Folder trees this can take a considerable amount of time.

The following Script does this enumeration for all the Public Folders (that the Mailbox that is running the script) has access to, it checks to see if there are any Rules that are Active or Disabled, and also produces a basic stats report of the Number of Items, FolderSize and also the PidTagLocalCommitTimeMax time which should give you the last time the items in the folder where last changed. eg it produces something like


With this base you can add-in whatever you want to do with each folder depending on your particular requirements.

I've put a copy of this script on GitHub here https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/blob/master/PublicFolderMod.ps1

To Run the script you need to pass in a Mailbox this is used to connect to CAS server and then connect eg

Enum-PublicFolders -MailboxName mailbox@domain.com
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 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

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 ...
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.