Skip to main content

Update to ExchangeContacts Module to support Modern Auth,Exporting all Contacts to a VCF file (or CSV) ,NON_IPM root folder,hidden contact folders and dumpster exports

I've done some updating of my ExchangeContacts PowerShell module to support the following

  1. Modern Authentication in Office365 (distributing the ADAL dll with this module)
  2. Compiled and distributed the latest version of the EWS Managed API from GitHub with the module
  3. New cmdlet Export-EXCContacts that supports exporting all contacts in a Folder to a single VCF File
  4. New cmdlet Export-EXCContacts that supports exporting all contacts to a CSV file (this was already possible with the ExportFolder cmdlet but this is a slightly enhanced format)
  5. New cmldet Export-EXCRootContacts lets you export the Non_IPM Subtree folders that contain contacts. (Some of these are created by the Office365 substrate process) for example mycontacts, AllContacts, ContactSearch folders etc. Include dedup code based on Email Address in this cmdlet
  6. This is already supported but I wanted to show how you can export the Hidden Contacts Folder likes Recipient Cache, Gal and Organizational Contacts
  7. New cmdlet Get-EXCDumpsterContacts get the contacts that are in the RecoverableItems Deletions or Purges Folder
  8. New cmdlet Export-EXCDumpsterContacts Exports the contacts that are in the RecoverableItems Deletions or Purges Folder to a single VCF or csv file

Using Modern Authentication

As Basic Authentication in EWS is going away soon in Office365 I've enabled Modern Auth for this module using the ADAL dll which gets distributed via the bin directory in the Module. I didn't enabled it by default because it would cause issues with OnPrem Exchange so to use Modern Auth you just need to use the -ModernAuth switch. You can still pass in the PSCredential object with the -ModernAuth switch and oAuth will still be used vai the username and password grant to allow for silent auth. There is also provision to pass in your own client id for custom app registrations with the -ClientId parameter eg a simple example for using ModernAuth is 



Get-EXCContact -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com
 -EmailAddress what@what.com -ModernAuth
Export-EXCContacts

Export-EXCContacts supports exporting all the contacts from any folder in a Mailbox to a single VCF file or a CSV File. (EWS provides the VCF nativly for Mailbox contacts so this cmlet hanldes streaming them out to a single file). Eg here are some examples

Exporting to a single VCF

Export-EXCContacts -Folder "\Contacts" -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com
 -ModernAuth -FileName c:\temp\exp.vcf
or to a CSV


Export-EXCContacts -Folder "\Contacts" -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com
 -ModernAuth -FileName c:\temp\exp.csv -ExportAsCSV
Export-EXCRootContacts

Export-EXCRootContacts supports exporting contacts from the NON_IPM_Subtree folders in a Mailbox. Typically folders here are created by either a Client like Outlook or OWA, other Office365 substrate process (eg Microsoft Teams) or other third party apps where they want the data to be hidden from the user. Examples of these folders would be Allcontacts, mycontacts etc. I've added this more for educational and diag purposes and Included some dedup code to deduplicate exports based on the EmailAddress. An example of export the AllContacts Folder to a CSV file


Export-EXCRootContacts -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com -FolderName AllContacts -FileName c:\temp\allContacts.csv
-ExportAsCSV -ModernAuth

Get-EXCDumpsterContacts


This cmdlet will query either the RecoverableItemsDeletions or RecoverableItemsPurges folders in a Mailbox (Dumpster v2 folder) and it will get any contacts that exist in these folders and return them as EWSContact objects. (You can then process them further eg copy,move etc)

eg


Get-EXCDumpsterContacts -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com -ModernAuth -Purges
or purges




Get-EXCDumpsterContacts -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com -ModernAuth 
Export-EXCDumpsterContacts

This cmdlet builds on Get-EXCDumpsterContacts and allows you to export what is returned to either a single VCF file or a CSV file. (same logic as Export-EXCContacts)



Export-EXCDumpsterContacts -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com -ExportAsCSV
 -FileName c:\temp\dumpsterDeletions.csv
or purges


Export-EXCDumpsterContacts -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com -purges -ExportAsCSV
 -FileName c:\temp\dumpsterPurges.csv


Exporting  hidden Contacts folders

One last thing I wanted to demonstrate with this module is the ability to export the Hidden contact folders in your mailbox, if you have ever peeked at the Contacts folder subfolder hierarchy in a MAPI editor like MFCmapi there are a number of Hidden folders eg


Folders like Recipient Cache, Gal Contacts and Organizational Contacts folder all serve different client specific tasks (that do go wrong sometimes). So you can use this module to export the contacts in these folders to a CSV for any troubleshooting, migration or personal interest needs.

Here are some examples of exporting contacts from those folders to a csv file


Export-EXCContacts -Folder "\Contacts\Organizational Contacts"
-MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com -ModernAuth -FileName c:\temp\exp.csv 
-ExportAsCSV

The new module can be found on the Powershell Gallery https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/ExchangeContacts/1.6.0.0 and the source is available here on GitHub https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/tree/master/EWSContacts/Module

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...

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...

Exporting and Uploading Mailbox Items using Exchange Web Services using the new ExportItems and UploadItems operations in Exchange 2010 SP1

Two new EWS Operations ExportItems and UploadItems where introduced in Exchange 2010 SP1 that allowed you to do a number of useful things that where previously not possible using Exchange Web Services. Any object that Exchange stores is basically a collection of properties for example a message object is a collection of Message properties, Recipient properties and Attachment properties with a few meta properties that describe the underlying storage thrown in. Normally when using EWS you can access these properties in a number of a ways eg one example is using the strongly type objects such as emailmessage that presents the underlying properties in an intuitive way that's easy to use. Another way is using Extended Properties to access the underlying properties directly. However previously in EWS there was no method to access every property of a message hence there is no way to export or import an item and maintain full fidelity of every property on that item (you could export the...
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.