Skip to main content

Simple Mail Gui's for the REST API on Office365 and Exchange 2016

As I've been adding new cmdlets to my Exch-REST PowerShell module I've been knocking up against some of the limitations and frustrations of working within a console environment. One of them is if say I find some Messages within a Mailbox which needs further investigation for whatever reason, It good to have an easy way of opening up that message to take a look at the content that isn't normally easy to view in the cmdline like the html body of a message and maybe I want to download any attachments or MessageHeaders without needing to open Outlook or OWA. A number of years ago I created a simple EWS mail client that just acted as a simple Email client using EWS so I decided to port this to the REST API and include it in the Exch-Rest Module. I also broke out two of the winforms from this simple client to enable just reading a particular Message you may have found using any of the other cmldets as well as a simple Form to Send a New Message with or without an Attachment.

So with Version 2.7 of the Exch-REST Module you can now use the

Start-EXRMailClient cmdlet which will start the small mail client which will use the underlying Exch-REST Module cmldets to open and browse Mailbox Mail folders, Read Items from a Folder you select in the TreeView, Show Internet Message Headers or Download attachments from messages in the datagrid eg


Getting Messages from the Inbox


Showing the content of a Message


or show the Message Headers



You can either start the Mailbox client using Start-EXRMailClient cmdlet with no parameters or pass in a Mailbox and AccessToken you maybe working with and it will automatically enumerate the Folders from that Mailbox using the token passed in.

To use the Read Message Form on a message you have found in the cmdline through using another cmdlet eg to open the last message in the Inbox you could use


$Items = Get-WellKnownFolderItems -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com -AccessToken $AccessToken -WellKnownFolder Inbox -TopOnly:$true -Top 1
Invoke-EXRReadEmail -ItemRESTURI $Items[0].ItemRESTURI -AccessToken $AccessToken -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com
To Start the New Message form just use

Invoke-EXRNewMessagesForm -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com -AccessToken $AccessToken




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...

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.

Export calendar Items to a CSV file using Microsoft Graph and Powershell

For the last couple of years the most constantly popular post by number of views on this blog has been  Export calendar Items to a CSV file using EWS and Powershell closely followed by the contact exports scripts. It goes to show this is just a perennial issue that exists around Mail servers, I think the first VBS script I wrote to do this type of thing was late 90's against Exchange 5.5 using cdo 1.2. Now it's 2020 and if your running Office365 you should really be using the Microsoft Graph API to do this. So what I've done is create a PowerShell Module (and I made it a one file script for those that are more comfortable with that format) that's a port of the EWS script above that is so popular. This script uses the ADAL library for Modern Authentication (which if you grab the library from the PowerShell gallery will come down with the module). Most EWS properties map one to one with the Graph and the Graph actually provides better information on recurrences then...
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.