Outlook Addin for exporting Email to EML from Outlook on the Web

One of the more interesting announcements from the recent Microsoft Build conference was the ability to get the MimeContent of Messages in the Microsoft Graph API https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/blogs/mime-format-support-for-microsoft-graph-apis-preview/ . This is a much needed feature as it was something that a lot of people use in EWS application, it still comes with a few limitations the Graph has a 4GB underlying limit for REST https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/post-post-attachments?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=javascript and its export only at the moment so you can't import messages using it. One other thing is that its only in the Graph endpoint not the Outlook Rest endpoint so its not that easy to use from a Mail Add-in (without additional security config).

One thing I do a bit when developing code for Exchange and Outlook is to look at the MimeContent of Messages as well as the MAPI properties using a MAPI editor like OutlookSpy of MFCMapi. This requires having Outlook installed and a profile configured which can be a bit of pain. These days for my everyday mail uses I always use Outlook on the web or Outlook mobile (for convenience and also they are good clients) so unless I have a specific need for using the Outlook desktop client it usually remains closed. So being able to export a message to Mime from with Outlook on the web is something personally I find useful so I decided to put together a Mail Addin that would allow me to do just this. I would have liked to have used the new graph operation for this, however to use this operation requires some extra integration obstacles that made EWS a better option to use because I just wanted it to work everywhere (across multiple tenants). The only limitation with EWS is that its restricted to a max a 1MB https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/add-ins/limits-for-activation-and-javascript-api-for-outlook-add-ins#limits-for-javascript-api so this will only work if the message is less the 1MB which isn't a problem for the majority of things I want to use it for.

How does it work

The addin is pretty simple in that it just makes a EWS GetItem Request for the current Message using the makeEwsRequestAsync method which will include the MimeContent the Message. Then the code will use msSaveOrOpenBlob on Edge or a automated link workaround to decode the base64 contents of the MimeContent returned and present a download back to user in either Chrome or Edge. It action it looks like the following

I've put the code for this addin on GitHub here https://github.com/gscales/gscales.github.io/tree/master/OWAExportAsEML if you want to test this out yourself you can add it straight from my GitHub pages repo using

https://gscales.github.io/OWAExportAsEML/OWAExportAsEML.xml