Skip to main content

Reporting on the Favorites Shortcut items in Outlook, OWA and Outlook Mobile using PowerShell and EWS

One of the email UI features that I find the most useful in Outlook on the Web and Outlook mobile is the People favorites feature which saves having to do a search for historical email from particular high use contacts. Favorites is a feature that has evolved especially in Outlook on the web and Outlook mobile eg People/Persona favorites and category favorites. The way this is implemented in the Mailbox is interesting eg   People/Persona favorites get their own search folder under the favoritePersonas Folder in the Non_IPM_Subtree in a Mailbox eg


As well as a configuration object under the 

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


The configuration object is of interest as this tells as a lot about what type of favorites are being created and used in a Mailbox. It also can serve in a custom app if you want to reproduce the same type of favorites folder tree (you will need to use EWS for this as the Graph API is unfortunately hamstrung for this type of application). On the favourites object is a Extended property call RawJson that contains all the information that is of interest eg.



For this post I've created an EWS script that first finds the above folder and then gets all the Shortcut Items in that folder and retrieves the rawJson extended property on each of the ShortCut Items. It then does a little bit more data abstraction from the Json to make it into a report-able object. So for instance we can do a

Quick view of what Shortcuts are being used (which clients,Last-Visted(for groups)and type) eg


In the above Legacy = Outlook Desktop and Outlook Services is the Outlook Mobile client on Android

Just the Personal favorites


The script for this post is available on GitHub https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/blob/master/Favourites.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 MimeMessage via the Microsoft Graph using the Graph SDK, MimeKit and MSAL

One of the new features added to the Microsoft Graph recently was the ability to create and send Mime Messages (you have been able to get Message as Mime for a while). This is useful in a number of different scenarios especially when trying to create a Message with inline Images which has historically been hard to do with both the Graph and EWS (if you don't use MIME). It also opens up using SMIME for encryption and a more easy migration path for sending using SMTP in some apps. MimeKit is a great open source library for parsing and creating MIME messages so it offers a really easy solution for tackling this issue. The current documentation on Send message via MIME lacks any real sample so I've put together a quick console app that use MSAL, MIME kit and the Graph SDK to send a Message via MIME. As the current Graph SDK also doesn't support sending via MIME either there is a workaround for this in the future my guess is this will be supported.
Read more

Export calendar Items to a CSV file using Microsoft Graph and Powershell

For the last couple of years the most constantly popular post by number of views on this blog has been  Export calendar Items to a CSV file using EWS and Powershell closely followed by the contact exports scripts. It goes to show this is just a perennial issue that exists around Mail servers, I think the first VBS script I wrote to do this type of thing was late 90's against Exchange 5.5 using cdo 1.2. Now it's 2020 and if your running Office365 you should really be using the Microsoft Graph API to do this. So what I've done is create a PowerShell Module (and I made it a one file script for those that are more comfortable with that format) that's a port of the EWS script above that is so popular. This script uses the ADAL library for Modern Authentication (which if you grab the library from the PowerShell gallery will come down with the module). Most EWS properties map one to one with the Graph and the Graph actually provides better information on recurrences then...
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.