Skip to main content

Doing Mailbox Change discovery with an EWS PowerShell Script

Mailbox Change discovery is the process of looking at any folders or items that are new or have been modified recently in a Mailbox. Its useful in a number of different ways including (but not limited to)

  • Looking at what objects a third party Addin is creating or modifying in your mailbox
  • Help to work out which FAI (Folder Associated Item) is being modified when changes are made to the configuration in Outlook or Outlook on the Web (this can be useful if you then want to automate those changes in your own scripts)
  • Fixing client issues caused by corrupt or bad items (eg if you've ever used MFCMapi to delete and Item that's causing a particular client function not to work correctly)
  • Getting an understanding of how the backend scaffolding of new features work in Outlook on the Web (eg looking at what the substrate Is doing in Office365) 
If you have ever looked recently at the Non_IPM Root folder of any Office365 Mailbox you can see by the large number of folders that are used by various different apps, substrate processes as well as for new client features there is a lot going on. So this script can also help give a bit of insight on what's happening in the background when you activate or use particular features (or potentially point you to the location in the Mailbox when your looking at problems that might be occurring with certain features)
I'll go through a specific use case later looking at the "contact favourite feature (which I struggled to even find the UI documentation for)" which is what prompted me to write this script.

What this script does

The script has three main functions

  1. Enumerates every folder in the Mailbox (both IPM and NON_IPM_Subtree) as well as Search Folders and looks at the created and modified date of each folder. If they where created or modified in the lookbacktime then it's adds them to the report
  2. It then does a Scan of the Items in each Folder (excluding Search Folders) and if it finds any items that where modified or created after the lookbacktime then it adds these to the report
  3. It then does a Scan of the FAI Items (Folder Associated Items) in the Folder and again if the items where modified or created after the lookbacktime then it adds these to the report
The Output of the Report then contains information about what folders, Items and FAI Items have either been created or modified in the Mailbox in the last x number of seconds.

An Example

The best way to demonstrate this is with an Example which was the reason I wrote the script, The Contact Favourite feature in Outlook on the Web gives you the ability to click the star next to a Contacts name in OWA which then creates a favourite Shortcut eg


So I wanted to know when you did this where does the favourite item get created, what information it was storing and what other changes where happening. So this is where the following script comes into handy to find this information out all I needed to do was favourite a contact and then run the script immediately after to look at the items which changed in the Mailbox in the last 60 seconds. Eg a run of the script after I made the above change yielded a report that looked like



So from the above report you can see that firstly a new Search Folder was created 
\FavoritePersonas\Glen Scales_7d09f835-0028-4bd7-bed9-59535127bbe1 New SearchFolder



under the \FavoritePersonas\ directory and also an object of type SDS.32d4b5e5-7d33-4e7f-b073-f8cffbbb47a1.OutlookFavoriteItem was created under the folder

\ApplicationDataRoot\32d4b5e5-7d33-4e7f-b073-f8cffbbb47a1\outlookfavorites

The other thing that I included in the report was the EntryId of the Item found so in the above case i can take the EntryId for the outlookfavourite and open the Item in a Mapi editor like OutlookSpy or MFCMAPI eg


And you can then see all the MAPI properties on the Item (or delete/export etc)
That's it relatively simple to use eg

Invoke-MailboxChangeDiscovery -MailboxName mailbox@domain -secondstolookback 60

I've put this script up on GitHub here https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/blob/master/ChangeDiscovery.ps1
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.