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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


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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.

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