There's a old saying that a tradesmen is only as good as their tools and the same can be said for ITPro's and developers. You can save yourself a lot of time when investigating particular tasks you want a script by having something ready built that can do 90% of task at hand. I've decided to share a script that I use quite often during the investigation phase of any EWS scripting tasks that allows you to generically grab a folder (or collection of Folders) and the Items within those folder. While this is something that can be put together quite quickly together using snippets there always tends to be extra properties that you need for different tasks so the generic script I'm showing today includes all the niceties kind of like having the right sized spanner rather the shifter.
So the script in question can be found on GitHub here https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/blob/master/GenericFolderAndItem.ps1
So what can it do
Connect and show the properties on a Mailbox Folder eg
So in the above example this is my Inbox, some of the extra things I've added in this script over what you would normally see in EWS is to promote the ExtendedProperties for the retentionTags,FolderSize,FolderPath and AttachmentCount to first class folder properties on the object so they are much easy to first view but to also script on top off. Eg say I only want to look at the Inbox and Subfolders of the Inbox there where larger then 10 MB I can do the following
Updating your tools
Unlike like a normal spanner which is literally forged in steel this tool can be updated as you go but adding in extra properties or methods that you find useful as you go. If you find the script useful and what to share any of you updates please submit them to the GitHub repo https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/issues
So the script in question can be found on GitHub here https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/blob/master/GenericFolderAndItem.ps1
So what can it do
Connect and show the properties on a Mailbox Folder eg
Invoke-GenericFolderConnect -MailboxName mailbox@domain.com -FolderPath \Inbox -Credentials $cred
So in the above example this is my Inbox, some of the extra things I've added in this script over what you would normally see in EWS is to promote the ExtendedProperties for the retentionTags,FolderSize,FolderPath and AttachmentCount to first class folder properties on the object so they are much easy to first view but to also script on top off. Eg say I only want to look at the Inbox and Subfolders of the Inbox there where larger then 10 MB I can do the following
Invoke-GenericFolderConnect -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com -FolderPath \Inbox -Credentials $cred -Recurse | Where-Object{$_.FolderSize -gt 10mb} | select FolderPath,FolderSize
The above examples uses the -Recurse switch parameter of the script to recurse Subfolders of the pass in folder Path you connected to and then makes use of those promoted properties using the pipeline and Where-Object in PowerShell.
One other thing I've added to the Standard EWS FolderObject is the GetLastItem ScriptMethod which does what is says by getting the last item in a folder. For example if I wanted to get the Last Item in My Inbox I could use the following
Invoke-GenericFolderConnect -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com -RootFolder -Credentials $cred -Recurse | Where-Object{$_.GetLastItem().DateTimeReceived -gt (Get-Date).AddDays(-7)} | Select-Object FolderPath,FolderSize,@{Name="DateTimeReceived"; Expression = {$_.L
astItem.DateTimeReceived}},@{Name="Subject"; Expression = {$_.LastItem.Subject}})}
As I've show above getting the Last Item in a folder can be useful but a lot of the time you will want to enumerate all the Items with a folder (or a least the Top X) to do particular reporting or investigation tasks. To do you use the following generic function which will give you back all the items in the Inbox.
Invoke-GenericFolderItemEnum -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com -FolderPath \Inbox -Credentials $creds
To limit the results to just the top 10 items in the Folder use the -MaxCount switch eg
Invoke-GenericFolderItemEnum -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com -FolderPath \Inbox -Credentials $creds -MaxCount 10
EWS by default only returns certain properties while doing an item enumeration (using findItems) so things like the Recipients and the Message body wont be returned by default for performance reasons. If you wanted to view these properties on a Message you could use the Load() method on the Message itself or you can use the -FullDetails Switch which will batch these operations which will make it perform better if you have a large number of items that you wish to do this on. Eg to show the last 10 messages in the Inbox with FullDetails
Invoke-GenericFolderItemEnum -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com -FolderPath \Inbox -Credentials $creds -MaxCount 10 -FullDetails
Invoke-GenericFolderItemEnum -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com -FolderPath \Inbox -Credentials $creds -MaxCount 5 -Recurse | Select FolderPath,Subject
Like the Generic EWS Folder Object I've added some properties and methods that I've found useful. The first is the FolderPath which is useful when doing a recursion and reporting and I've also added one script method on objects called DownloadAttachments that will allow you to download all the attachments on an Item to the directory you pass in. eg To download the attachments from the last item in the Inbox use
Unlike like a normal spanner which is literally forged in steel this tool can be updated as you go but adding in extra properties or methods that you find useful as you go. If you find the script useful and what to share any of you updates please submit them to the GitHub repo https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/issues