Skip to main content

Automating opening a Search-Mailbox result in Excel using EWS

While the Search-Mailbox cmdlet is now depreciated in Exchange Online, OnPrem its still used a fair bit and also does still have some use in the cloud for specific tasks. I've been using it this week a fair bit for various testing tasks and one pain I found when doing a lot of repeated searches in logging mode is each time to have to go in, open the results message in the discovery search mailbox and download the attachment with the log file, unzip and open it in Excel. So I came up with a way of automating this in powershell which turned out to be pretty simple but effective.

First off the only information you need to get the Results Message gets returned in the Target Folder property of the Search results eg.


 The TargetFolder value tells you what folder in the discovery Search mailbox the results are stored in and the DateTime value that will be in the subject of the Results Message.

So in EWS you can use FindFolder to Find that Folder (using a Split on "\" which will work as long as you don't put that in the displayName) and then FindItem can be used to find the results Item eg.

        $ivItemView = New-Object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ItemView(1)  
        $SfSearchFilter = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.SearchFilter+ContainsSubstring([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ItemSchema]::Subject, $Subject) 
        $findItemResults = $Folder.FindItems($SfSearchFilter, $ivItemView)
        if ($findItemResults.Items.Count -eq 1) {
            return $findItemResults.Items[0]
        }
        else {
            throw "No Item found"
        }

Once you have the Results Message you can download the Attachment using some code like this

        if ($SearchResultItem.HasAttachments) {
            $SearchResultItem.Load();
            foreach ($Attachment in $SearchResultItem.Attachments) {
                $Attachment.Load()

I then save it to the default downloads directory using


                $downloadDirectory = (New-Object -ComObject Shell.Application).NameSpace('shell:Downloads').Self.Path
                $fileName = ($downloadDirectory + "\" + $ItemPath.SubString(1).Replace("/", "-").Replace(":", "-") + "-" + $Attachment.Name.ToString())
                $fiFile = new-object System.IO.FileStream($fileName, [System.IO.FileMode]::Create)
                $fiFile.Write($Attachment.Content, 0, $Attachment.Content.Length)
                $fiFile.Close()

and finally open the ZipFile, Extract the csv datastream from the Archive and save that as a File in the Downloads Directory and then open that file in Excel.


                if ($FileName.contains(".zip")) {                    
                    $Zip = [System.IO.Compression.ZipFile]::OpenRead($FileName)
                    try {
                        foreach ($file in $Zip.Entries) {
                            if ($file.Name.contains(".csv")) {
                                $ms = New-Object System.IO.MemoryStream
                                $ZipStream = $file.Open()
                                $ZipStream.CopyTo($ms);
                                $outputfile = $FileName.replace("zip", "")
                                [System.IO.File]::WriteAllBytes($outputfile, $ms.ToArray())
                                Invoke-Item $outputfile
                                
                            }
                        }
                    }
                    catch {
                        Write-Host $_.ScriptStackTrace
                    }
                    $Zip.Dispose()

An example of using this is

$SearchResult = Search-Mailbox -id meganb -TargetFolder Search1 -SearchQuery from:glen -TargetMailbox "DiscoverySearchMailbox{D919BA05-46A6-415f-80AD-7E09334BB852}@xxx.onmicrosoft.com" -LogOnly -LogLevel Full

then

Get-SearchMailboxResultsToExcel -MailboxName "DiscoverySearchMailbox{D919BA05-46A6-415f-80AD-7E09334BB852}@M365x680608.onmicrosoft.com" -SearchResultPath $SearchResult.TargetFolder -Verbose

or if you want to use ModerAuth (You will need the Adal dll in the same directory)

Get-SearchMailboxResultsToExcel -MailboxName "DiscoverySearchMailbox{D919BA05-46A6-415f-80AD-7E09334BB852}@M365x680608.onmicrosoft.com" -ModernAuth -SearchResultPath $SearchResult.TargetFolder -Verbose

I've put a download of this script on GitHub https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/blob/master/Get-SearchMailboxResultsToExcel.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 Graph is limited to a m
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 I wrote th
Read more

Testing and Sending email via SMTP using Opportunistic TLS and oAuth in Office365 with PowerShell

As well as EWS and Remote PowerShell (RPS) other mail protocols POP3, IMAP and SMTP have had OAuth authentication enabled in Exchange Online (Official announcement here ). A while ago I created  this script that used Opportunistic TLS to perform a Telnet style test against a SMTP server using SMTP AUTH. Now that oAuth authentication has been enabled in office365 I've updated this script to be able to use oAuth instead of SMTP Auth to test against Office365. I've also included a function to actually send a Message. Token Acquisition  To Send a Mail using oAuth you first need to get an Access token from Azure AD there are plenty of ways of doing this in PowerShell. You could use a library like MSAL or ADAL (just google your favoured method) or use a library less approach which I've included with this script . Whatever way you do this you need to make sure that your application registration  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/quickstart-register-
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.